Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 70, Number 3, 2002

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY (ISSN 0042-143X)

EDITORIAL STAFF

WILSON G. MARTIN, Editor

STANFORDJ. LAYTON, Managing Editor

KRISTEN SMART ROGERS, Associate Editor

ALLAN KENT POWELL, Book Review Editor

ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS

NOEL A. CARMACK, Hyrum, 2003

LEE ANN KREUTZER,Torrey, 2003

ROBERT S. MCPHERSON, Blanding, 2004

MIRIAM B. MURPHY, Murray, 2003

ANTONETTE CHAMBERS NOBLE, Cora,m, 2002

JANET BURTON SEEGMILLER, Cedar City, 2002

JOHN SILLITO, Ogden, 2004

GARY TOPPING, Salt Lake City, 2002

RONALD G.WATT,~~S~ Valley City, 2004

Utah Historical Quarterly was established in 1928 to publish articles, documents, and reviews contributing to knowledge of Utah history. The Quarterly is published four times a year by the Utah State Historical Society, 300 Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101. Phone (801) 533-3500 for membership and publications information. Members of the Society receive the Quarterly, Beehive History, Utah Preservation, and the bimonthly newsletter upon payment of the annual dues: individual, $25; institution, $25; student and senior citizen (age sixty-five or older), $20; sustaining, $35; patron, $50; business, $100.

Manuscripts submitted for publication should be double-spaced with endnotes. Authors are encouraged to include a PC diskette with the submission. For additional information on requirements, contact the managing editor. Articles and book reviews represent the views of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Utah State Historical Society.

Periodicals postage is paid at Salt Lake City, Utah.

POSTMASTER: Send address change to Utah Historical Quarterly, 300 Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101.

194 IN THIS ISSUE

196 An Immigrant Story: Three Orphaned Italians in Early Utah Territory

By Michael W Homer

215 Wakara Meets the Mormons, 1848-52: A Case Study in Native American Accommodation

By Ronald W Walker

238 "Electricity for Everything": The Progress Company and the Electrification of Rural Salt Lake County, 1897-1924

By Judson Callaway and Su Richards

258 The Fight at Soldier Crossing, 1884: Military Considerations in Canyon Country

By Robert S. McPherson and Winston B. Hurst

282 BOOK REVIEWS

Maureen Trudelle. Navajo Lfeways: Contemporary Issues, Ancient Knowledge

Reviewed by Nancy C. Maryboy

Eileen Hallet Stone. A Homeland in the West: UtahJews Remember

Reviewed by Jeanne Abrams

Charles M.Robinson 111. General Crook and the Western Frontier

Reviewed by Mark R. Grandstaff '

Stanford J. Layton, ed., Being Dgerent: Stories of Utah5 Minorities

Reviewed by Linda Sillitoe

Jackson J. Benson. Down by the Lemonade Springs: Essays on Wallace Stegner

Reviewed by Russell Burrows

David M. Wrobel and Patrick T. Long, eds. Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West

Reviewed by Wilson Martin

293 BOOK NOTICES

The basic story of Utah's "new immigrants" will be familiar to long-time readers of Utah Historical Quarterly. These were the people who came to Utah from eastern, southern, and southeastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to find work in the mines, in smelters, on the railroads, and elsewhere as blue-collar workers. They came in sizeable numbers, tended to be nonMormons who settled in ethnic enclaves, and took two or three generations to integrate fully into the social mainstream.

Much less common were immigrants from these more distant European ports who came as LDS converts during the pioneer period. Daniel, Antoinette, and Jacques (James) Bertoch were three such people. Converted Waldensians, these young people left Piedmont for Zion in 1854 and experienced an incredible series of adventures that have somehow escaped the attention of historians until now. Their amazing saga is detailed in our first article.

Taking place at the same time were talks and negotiations between territorial leaders and the Ute leader Wakara. A complex, mercurial man, Wakara was (and continues to be) many things to many people. Historians have been fascinated by him from the beginning, and several of their portraits have graced the pages of this journal through the years. Our second article builds on previous studies by adding much new detail and insight as it focuses on the years before the Walker War. Written with sensitivity and

balance, it endows this important personality with flesh-and-blood traits never before delineated so well.

Our third article has the feel of modernity as it centers on the coming of electrical power to rural Salt Lake County from the 1880s to the 1920s. The Progress Company was an important pioneer in this far-reaching technology, and its turbulent history is well told in these pages for the first time.

Hard to believe-but true-electrical power had already found its way into some businesses and along city streets in Murray and Salt Lake City as cowboys, Indians, and U.S. soldiers were still engaged in Wild West-styled shootouts elsewhere in the territory. A fast-paced, confusing skirmish at Soldier Crossing in San Juan County, poorly understood by contemporary observers and variously interpreted by historians since, is finally analyzed and explained by two energetic, on-the-ground researchers in our concluding article. It is an appropriate capstone to this issue, combining with the preceding articles to illustrate the variety of experiences, personalities, circumstances, geography, values, and incidents that define Utah history and make it so interesting.

OPPOSITE: "Dinner Scene of Platueau Cow Boys," a c. 1887photo. Sam Todd, number 13, participated in and wrote about the Soldier Crossing skirmish.

ON THE COVER: Tailor John I? Wright at work in his shop on Main Street in Murray. Wright exemplifies the small business owners who received electricity through the Progress Company. Note the fuse box and meter mounted above the window, the suspended incandescent lamp, and the electric pressing iron. He retained his foot-treadle sewing machine, however. Courtesy of Diana S. Johnson; all rights reserved.

An Immigrant Story: Three Orphaned Italians in Early Utah Territory

By MICHAEL W. HOMER

w

illiam Mulder, a distinguished immigration historian, wrote almost fifty years ago that the immigrant story is "a source of history still unexplored, not only in Utah but in the United States at large. It is a hidden literature, a hidden history...it is a literature of the unlettered ...it is hidden in languages other than English [and] it is not in readily available form, often physically inaccessible."' More than twenty years later Mulder was still convinced that the immigrant voice remained hidden and that "in Mormon history this voice has been but faintly heard."2 Not much has changed since Mulder made these observations. Mulder, Helen Z. Papanikolas, Philip E Notarianni, and a few others have written about immigrants' experiences in Utah.3 But their voices are still Danieh and James only occasionally heard as "sources become (0' Jacques) Be*ochr Italian more elusive as each year passes."' immigrants to Utah.

Michael W. Homer is a trial lawyer living in Salt Lake City. A version of this paper was presented at the American Italian Historical Association meeting held in LasVegas in October 2001. The author wishes to thank Flora Ferrero, Mario DePillis, Matt Homer, Massimo Introvigne, and Philip E Notarianni for their comments, assistance, and inspiration.

' William Mulder, "Through Immigrant Eyes: Utah History at the Grass Roots," Utah Historical Quarterly 22 (1954):41,45.

William Mulder, "Mormon Angles of Historical Vision: Some Maverick Reflections," Journal of Mormon History 3 (1976): 13, 19.

See, for instance, William Mulder, Homeward to Zion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957);Helen Z. Papanikolas, ed., The Peoples of Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1976).

Andrew E Rolle, The Immigrant Upraised (Norman:University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 12.

Notarianni has been diligent in exposing the hidden stories of Italian Ameri~ans.~He has described the lives of Italians who immigrated to Utah Territory between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time, Italy was overpopulated, offered few jobs for sued laborers, and was suffering massive crop failures. These Italians immigrated "with the ardent desire to shed their old world identity and be reborn to a new life.. . . They craved a new identity and a new life."6

In Utah, as in the West generally, Itahan immigrants were a "relatively small percentage of the total population" and "too few in number to change its culture radi~ally."~Although most Italians who immigrated to Utah during the nineteenth century came to chase the American dream in mines and on railroads, the first group of Itahans that settled in the territory were Mormon converts who left their ancestral homes near Turin between 1854 and 1855.* They came to Utah not only because they believed that Mormonism would enrich their lives and, according to Mormon doctrine, ensure that their families would remain intact after death, but also because, like most other immigrants, they desired to join a new economic brotherhood.

Mulder calls LDS converts' "break with the Old World.. .a compound fracture: a break with the old church and with the old co~ntry."~Even though they were prepared to live among and marry immigrants from other countries and cultures, it was not always easy for them to assimilate into Utah society. It took time for their fractures, the break with the old church and the old country, to heal. They had to overcome language, cultural, and religious differences. They had even more difficulty integrating into American society and realizing its promise of greater economic opportunities. Like most immigrants, they "faced years of hard work in order to save enough money to buy improved land or a going business."1° This process was even more difficult for converts who lost their parents, became orphans, and were sent to live in inhospitable places.

When Mormon missionaries arrived in Italy in June 1850, they began proselyting in Piedmont among the only indigenous Protestants on the

Among Notarianni's many articles concerning the Italian immigrant experience, see Philip F. Notarianni, "Italian Fraternal Organizations in Utah, 1897-1 934," Utah Historical Quarterly 43 (1975): 172-87; "Italianiti in Utah: The Immigrant Experience," in The Peoples of Utah, 303-31; "Utah's Ellis Island: The Diflicult 'Americanization' of Carbon County," Utah Historical Quarterly 47 (1979): 17-93; "Italian Involvement in the 1903-04 Coal Miners' Strike in Southern Colorado and Utah," in George E. Pozzetta, ed., Pane e Lavoro: The Italian American Working Class (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1980), 47-65; and Philip E Notarianni and Richard Raspa, "The Italian Community of Helper, Utah: Its Historic and Folkloric Past and Present," in Richard N. Juliani, ed., The Family and Community LiJe of Italian Americans (NewYork: Italian American Historical Association, 1983),23-33.

Eric Hoffer, The Due Believer (reprint, NewYork: Time, 1964), 95-96.

Rolle, The Immigrant Upraised,9,333.

Missions opened by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon church) in England in 1837 and in France, Scandinavia, Italy, Switzerland, and Prussia in 1850-51 produced thousands of converts who immigrated to Utah before the end of the century; see Bruce A.Van Orden, Building Zion: The Latter-day Saints in Europe (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1996).

Mulder, "Through Immigrant Eyes," 47; Mulder, "Mormon Angles of HistoricalVision," 20.

'O Rolle, The Immigrant Upraised, 10.

Italian peninsula. The Waldensians were descendants of lay Catholic reformers who resided in Lyon, France, during the late twelfth century. These reformers lived in poverty and dedicated their lives to be witnesses for Christ, even though they were not compensated and had not received ecclesiastical approval. When their local bishop instructed them to stop preaching they refused; thereafter, the church excommunicated them and included them in its list of heretics. Not surprisingly, the group became increasingly distrustful of church authorities and began to regard themselves bound together in a separate religious community. Beginning in the thirteenth century they were driven from their urban venues and experienced a diaspora. They relocated not only in Piedmont but also in Provence, Dauphin&,Bohemia, and even in southern Italy (Calabria and Apulia). The Waldensians lived in isolated communities in each of these locations. They developed an underground culture, distinctive doctrines, and heretical rituals. In 1532 the Waldensians aligned themselves with Protestants in Switzerland and mohfied many of their historical doctrines and rituals. Thereafter they were part of a much larger target, and for the next two hundred years they were severely persecuted. Although the Reformation provided the catalyst for bringing the Waldensians in Piedmont out of their isolation, it resulted in their extinction in Germany, France, and southern Italy. They survived in Piedmont only because of their remote mountain location.

After the Waldensians aligned themselves with the Reformed Church in Switzerland, their pastors began emphasizing their pre-Reformation origins and they were increasingly convinced that, because of their history of persecution, they were a chosen people.They also claimed that they couldtrace their origins to the primitive church because of "some idealized hypothetical antecedents of the reformed church." Although there is no reliable evidence that the Waldensians originated before the twelfth century, their history is full of examples of "real people who had suffered persecution in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Alps."" Waldensians were forced to seek exile, to hide in caves, to repulse attacking government forces, and to heave large boulders from mountainsides at soldiers who advanced up their narrow valleys to destroy their villages.12

" See Euan Cameron, The Reformation of the Heretics: The Waldensians of the Alps, 1480-1580 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 237. Other recent studies ofwaldensian history include Giorgio Tourn, You Are My Witnesses:The Waldensians across 800 Ears (Torino: Claudiana, 1990); Prescott Stephens, The Waldensian Story:A Study in Faith, Intolerance and Survival (Lewes, Sussex: Book Guild Ltd., 1998); and Gabriel Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent, Persecution and Survival, c. 1 1 70-c. 1570 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

"The most famous caverns used by Piedmontese Waldensians for refuge during persecutions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were Gheisa d'la tana, located near Chanforan in the Angrogna valley, and the Bars de la Tagliola, located at the foot of the Rock of Casteluzzo. See GianVittorio Avondo and Franco Bellion, LE KlEi Pellice e Germanasca (Cuneo: L'Arciere, 1989), 102-103. See also Edward Finden, The Illustvations of the Kudois in a Series of Views (London: Charles Tilt, 1831), 31-32; and Ebenezer Henderson, The Vaudois: Comprising Observations Made during a Tour to the Valley of Piedmont, in the Summer of 1 844 (London: Snow, 1845), 115-1 6.

Protestant missionaries embraced the Waldensians to foster their own agendas. Anglicans believed that Waldensian claims to apostolic origins provided all Protestants a church through which they could trace an untainted priesthood back to the primitive church. Reformed Protestants, including the Calvinists in Switzerland and the Presbyterians in England, believed that Waldensian doctrines and rituals proved that their own reformed theology was closer to primitive Christianity than Catholicism was. Other churches, including the so-called American churches-Mormons, Adventists, and Bible Students-were convinced that the

Waldensians' history of persecution, their

LDS elder refusal to submit to papal authority, and many of their doctrines and practices demonstrated

that an apostasy had taken place and that the

Waldensians had preserved many pure doctrines of the primitive church.

this

Mormon missionary Lorenzo Snow believed that the Waldensians were "like the rose in the wilderness" and that their history of persecution had prepared them for his message." During the nineteenth century some Waldensians dissented &om their own church because they believed it had abandoned its historic mission to preach the primitive gospel. Some of these dissenters were later attracted by Snow's message. Although the group was no longer persecuted, its members lived poor and isolated lives. Mormon missionaries were struck by the extreme poverty and crowded conditions of their valleys. Hundreds ofwaldensians, out of a total population of only 20,000, were leaving their ancestral homes each year, not to escape religious persecution but to search for greater economic opportunities. Despite appalling economic conditions, the Waldensian leadership was reluctant to organize or endorse any program of emigration because it feared that members would eventually abandon their cultural and ethnic heritage if they left the valleys.

Snow made several promises to encourage Waldensian investigators to join his church and emigrate to Utah Territory. He reassured the persecution-weary Piedmontese that there was no "external, or internal danger" in Utah. He also pledged to them that "we all are rich-there is no real poverty, all men-have access to the soil, the pasture, the timber, the water power,

13For accounts of Lorenzo Snow's activities as an LDS missionary, see Lorenzo Snow, The Italian Mission (London:W.Aubrey, 1851), and Eliza R. Snow Smith, Biography and Family Record of Lorenxo Snow (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Co., 1884).

Engraving of the rock of

Luuo. From

peak,

Lorenzo Snow dedicated the

itafian

San Germano, Val Chisone, the home village of the Bertoch family.

and all the elements of wealth without money or price." Perhaps most important, he assured them that "many thousands [of] dollars have already been donated.. .to be increased to millions" for a Perpetual Emigrating Fund to assist the poor in emigrating." By the end of 1852, thirty-six persons had converted to Mormonism, and in 1853, the most successful year of the mission, fifty-three additional people chose baptism.'' Many of the converts were farmers who were experiencing increasing difficulties raising crops because of grape disease and potato rot.

In April 1853 the LDS First Presidency published its Ninth General Epistle, in which it instructed all church members to immigrate to Utah. In July the epistle appeared in the Millennia1 Star, which circulated throughout the European Mission.16The First Presidency reassured church members in Europe that the "Perpetual Emigrating Funds are in a prosperous condition," although "but a small portion is available for use this season." It also encouraged members to contribute to the fund to help "the Saints to come home.And let all who can, come without delay, and not wait to be helped by these funds, but leave them to help those who cannot help themselves.'' Finally the epistle encouraged widows to wait until they settled in Utah to be "sealed" to their dead husbands for eternity.

Jean Bertoch, a sixty-year-old farmer from San Germano Chisone, was among the fifty-three Waldensians converted in 1853. He was baptized by

l4 Lorenzo Snow, La Voix deJoseph (Torino: Ferrero et Franco, 1851), 73-74.This pamphlet was translated into English, in abbreviated form, the following year; see Lorenzo Snow, The Voice ofJoseph (Malta: n.p., 1852), 18.

l5 Concerning the Italian Mission, see Michael W. Homer, "The Italian Mission, 1850-1867," Sunstone 7 (1982): 16-21; Diane Stokoe, "The Mormon Waldensians," (M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, December 1985); Michael W. Homer, "The Church's Image in Italy from the 1840s to 1946: A Bibliographic Essay," BYU Studies 31 (1991): 83-114; Michael W. Homer, "Gli Italiani e i Mormoni," Renovatio 26 (1991): 79-106; Michael W Homer, "LDS Prospects in Italy for the Twenty-first Century," Dia1ogue:AJournaE ofMormon Thought 29 (1996): 139-58; Flora Ferrero, L'emigrazione valdese nello Utah nella seconda metd del1'800 (Tesa di Laurea: Universiti di Torino, 1999); Michael W. Homer, "'Like the Rose in the Wilderness': The Mormon Mission in the Kingdom of Sardinia," Mormon Historical Studies 1 (2000), 25-62; Michael W. Homer, "L'azione missionaria in Italia e nelle Valli Valdesi dei gruppi Americani 'non tradizionali' (Awentisiti, Mormoni, Testimoni di Geova)" in La Bibbia, la Coccarda e il Eicolore. I Valdesi fra due emancipaxioni, 1798-1848, a cura di Gian Paolo Romagnani (Torino: Claudiana, 2001), 505-25; and Flora Ferrero, "Dalle Valli Valdesi a1 Grande Lago Salato: Un percorso di conversione," in La Bibbia, la Coccarda e il Tricolore, ibid., 531-38.

l6 Millennia1 Star 15 (1853): 436-41.

Jabez Woodard, a thirty-two-year-old gardener from Peckham, England, whom mission president Lorenzo Snow chose as his succe~sor.'~Jean and his wife Marguerite Bounous, who had died in 1840, had three sons and two daughters:Jean, Antoinette, Marguerite, Daniel, and Jacques. Jean was a landowner in the Val Chisone, where the family lived, farmed, went to school, and enjoyed some social connections. Even after his wife's death, Jean remained close to his in-laws. One brother-in-law, Jean Pierre Meynier, was the mayor of San Germano and an elder in the Waldensian church. Another brother-in-law, Daniel Vinson, was a dissenter who became alienated from the Waldensian church during a reawakening ("risvelgio") in the valleys that began during the 1830s.

Jean and his five children were baptized on August 3, and twenty days later Jean was ordained an elder. The church program of immigration, described in La Voix de Joseph and reemphasized in the Ninth General Epistle, resonated with Jean Bertoch. Within a few months of his conversion and ordination,Jean took steps that he hoped would enable him and his children to leave their overcrowded valleys in Piedmont and immigrate to Utah. Jean was probably also encouraged by assurances that when he arrived in Utah he could participate in rituals that would guarantee that his wife, who had died when Jacques was still a toddler, would be sealed in marriage to him for eternity. In October Jean paid 200 lire to the Kingdom of Sardinia to secure a military deferment for his eighteen-year-old son, Daniel. Without the deferment, Daniel would have been required to enlist in the army, and he could not have left Italy for at least another two years.''

In December 1853 Bertoch sold the family's two-story home (which was also designed to shelter livestock) and the adjoining cropland, located on steep mountainsides above San Germano Chisone. Notwithstanding massive crop failures and depressed economic conditions, Bertoch sold his residence to Gioanna Bertalot for 2,200 lire, which was about the same amount he had invested in the property.19 In January 1854 Bertoch sold another field he used for farming farther upVal Chisone, in Pomaretto, for 300 lire.20Contemporary notarial records demonstrate that during the 1850s farmers continued to buy and sell property and that most departing Mormon converts could dispose of their properties for reasonable prices.

Shortly after Jean sold his properties, Mormon converts began preparing to leave Piedmont and take their long journey to Utah. Although Jean wanted to emigrate with his children,Jabez Woodard asked him to remain in Italy to preside over a third church branch, which was organized in San Germano on January 7, 1854.21Jean could have paid for his children's trip

l7 Concerning Jabez Woodard, see Jabez Woodard Journal, LDS Archives, Salt Lake City.

l8 Registro delle Insinuazioni di Pinerolo, 1853, vol. 1046,425-26,Archivio di Stato di Torino.

l9 Registro delle Insinuazioni di Pinerolo, 1854, vol. 1049,477-78,Archivio di Stato diTorino.

*'Registro delle Insinuazioni di San Secondo, 1854, vol. 562,157-59,Archivio di Stato di Torino.

21 Millennia1 Stay, 16 (1854):61-62.

Torre Pellice, where the immigrant Waldensians boarded coaches to cross the Alps.

by using the money he received when he sold his land, but he was asked to donate a portion of the proceeds to the LDS church to sustain the Italian

Mission. Converts from each of the mission's three branches received assistance from the Perpetual Emigrating Fund, so that no single branch would be favored over another and, perhaps most important, to ensure that the membership of no single branch would be dramatically depleted by emigration. The first group of emigrants included Barthslemy and Marianne Pons and their three children (representing the Angrogna Branch), and Philippe and Marie Cardon and their six children (representing the Saint-Barthdemy). Jean's children represented the San Germano Branch-Jean, age twenty-six; Antoinette, twenty-three; Marguerite, twenty-one; Daniel, eighteen; and Jacques, fifteen. Jabez Woodard planned to accompany the converts to England, meet his wife and three children there, and then continue to America. Jean was therefore confident that his children would be safe during the long journey to America. He sent them with the partial assistance of the Perpetual Emigrating Fund and promised them that he would join them in their new homeland the following year.

On February 8, 1854, twenty converts met in Torre Pellice to board coaches that eventually took them to Susa, a small village located at the foot of the Alps. In Susa they hired diligences, which were placed on skids and drawn by mules, to carry them up the steep Mt. Cenis Pass and across the Alps to France. After the converts had successfully crossed the Alps, the diligences were placed on wooden wheels and the group continued to Lyon, where they caught a train to Paris, and from there to Calais. In Calais they boarded a steamer that transported them to the British coast, where they took trains to London and then to Liverpool. On March 12 they boarded the John M. Wood, which crossed the Atlantic Ocean with 397 Mormon converts from England, Denmark, France, and Italy. On May 2, 1854, the first group of Mormon converts fiom Italy arrived in New Orleans.

On May 3 they boarded thejosiasiah Lawrence, a steamboat that transported them up the Mississippi to St. Louis. On May 14, shortly before arriving in St. Louis, most of the church members were detained on Arsenal Island, which in 1849 had become an inspection site and a quarantined area where immigrants were examined for cholera. On the morning theJosiah Lawrence arrived in quarantine, the Bertoch family suffered a tragic loss. Marguerite,

FROM WILLIAM BEATTIE. THE WALDENSES (LONDON. GEORGE VIRTUE 1838)

who had celebrated her twenty-first birthday shortly before leaving Italy, died of cholera in the arms of Philippe Cardon7s daughters. Eleven other converts died within a few hours and were buried with Marguerite on the island. Daniel Bertoch later called her death "one of [the] first hard trial[s] that I had to pass

When they were released from quarantine, the surviving Bertoch children started on the route that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had followed fifty years earlier in their epic journey across the American continent. The converts boarded steamships that conveyed them up the Missouri River to Westport, Missouri. Near Westport they camped at Prairie Camp, a Mormon staging area, where they prepared for the difficult overland journey across the Great Plains. While outfitting for the westward trek, Daniel took lessons "in breaking whiled fatt steers never befor having had any expirians with any kattle."23The converts remained at the staging area for several months before starting their trek to Utah during the third week in July. Daniel was assigned to the Robert L. Campbell company,24 while his siblings Jean, Jacques, and Antoinette traveled with the William A. Empey company. The companies traveled about ten miles per day during their westward trek.

While traveling across the Great Plains the companies banded their 150 wagons together when they saw Native Americans in the area. But they encountered greater dangers than Indians. Daniel remembered that "our cattle never unyoked until we were out of buffalo country.We would camp early enough to feed the cattle before dark.. .. One night we had a stampede.The whole plain trembled and shook under the weight of 125 yoke of cattle running madly over the plains. In the morning we found them two or three miles from the camp. They were all together and we did not lose one." But although they successfully recovered cattle, they lost additional converts. round the third week of ~u~ust,while camping near Fort Kearny, Nebraska Territory, the Bertoch children were stunned when their oldest brother, Jean, died of pneumonia. BarthGlemy Pons, the father of three small children, also died about the same time.25There were other close calls for the surviving Bertoch siblings. In rnid-September, near Fort Laramie, Jacques fell from a wagon and the wheels ran over his legs. Although the boy recovered, he and his sister entered the Salt LakeValley on October 26, two days afier their company's forty-three wagons arrived,

22Biographyof Daniel Bertoch (c. 1919), copy in possession of author.There are two variations: a manuscript written in Bertoch's handwriting and a typescript written in third person. The second variant contains details that were presumably recorded from stories told by Bertoch himself. Unless otherwise noted, material about Daniel comes from this source.

23 Ibid.

24RobertL. Campbell was a twenty-nine-year-old Scottish convert from Glasgow. He was also the president of the company of LDS emigrants aboard theJohn M. Wood.

25Biographyof Daniel Bertoch. Some family accounts also claim that Jean Bertoch, Jr., was injured during the trans-oceanic journey when he fell through a hatch on the ship but that he had recovered by the time he reached New Orleans.

because they had wandered away from the company and become lost in the mountain^.'^ Daniel's company entered the valley on October 28. It had taken the first group of Italian immigrants nine and one-half months after leaving Torre Pellice to reach Salt Lake City.

When Jacques and Antoinette arrived in Salt Lake they were introduced to Joseph Toronto, who took them to his residence on First Avenue to wait for Daniel. Daniel spent his first night in the city in a shelter "made back of a dirt wall, just north ofJohn Sharp's dwelling."The next day Daniel met Toronto, who "took me paniel] to his house where I met my brother and sister."27The Bertoch

Joseph Toronto. children were among many immigrants who spent a few days in Toronto's home before being sent to a settlement in the territory. Toronto was a thirty-six-year-old convert from Sicily who had met Brigham Young in 1845 and donated $2,600 in gold to the church.Three years later, he helped driveYoung9scattle across the plains. In 1849 Young asked Toronto to travel to Italy with Lorenzo Snow to help organize the LDS mission. When Toronto returned to Utah in July 1852 he lived with Young-and even became known as "JosephYoung"-until he married a Welsh convert and built his own home on First Avenue. His residence thereafter became a halfivay house for many newly arrived imrnigrant~.'~

Brigham Young asked Toronto to supervise the Bertoches because they were not accompanied by their father. The siblings were relatively young, did not speak English, and shared an Italian connection with Toronto. Even though Toronto did not speak French, the Waldensians' primary language, he spoke Italian, which was their second language. Unlike later Italian immigrants, the converts from Piedmont did not settle together in the same communities-The Pons, Cardon, and Bertoch families were sent to separate settlements along the Wasatch Front, and, with few exceptions, they did not see each other again.

Young had assigned Toronto the task of caring for his cattle herd on the Great Salt Lake's Antelope Island. The United States Army Topographical

26AndrewJenson, Latter-Day Saints Biographical Encyclopedia, 4 vols (Salt Lake City: Andrew Jenson History Co., 1901-1936), 2:462.

27 Biography of Daniel Bertoch.

28 Concerning Joseph Toronto, see James A. Toronto, "Giuseppe Efisio Taranto: Odyssey from Sicily to Salt Lake City," in Bruce A.Van Orden, D. Brent Smith, and Everett Smith,Jr., eds., Pioneers in Every Land (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1997), 125-47, and Joseph Toronto: Italian Pioneer and Patriarch (Farmington, Utah: Toronto Family Organization, 1983).

Engineers, commanded by John C. Fremont and including Fremont's guide and confidante Kit Carson, had first explored the lake in September 1843.29 When Frkmont and Carson returned to the Great Salt Lake in October 1845 they explored and named Antelope I~land.~'Frkmont's accounts influenced Brigham Young's decision to settle in Salt Lake Valley and to use Antelope Island for grazing. In 1848 Young sent Lot Smith, Heber P. Kimball, and Fielding Garr to explore the island and confirm whether it was suitable for grazing. During the fd of that year, several church members set up ranches on the island and drove their cattle over the sandbar that connected it with the mainland. In 1849Young asked Garr to be his on-site foreman and to care for church cattle and other livestock on the island. In the fall of that year Garr moved church cattle to the island and built a corral and an adobe ranch house-known as "the old church housew-as a residence for his family3*In April 1850 the Topographical Engineers, under the command of Howard Stansbury, conducted a more complete exploration of the lake. Some of Stansbury's company reached the eastern shore of Antelope Island, "passing over a sandbar which unites it with the mainland," but Stansbury landed on the island "[alfter a heavy row of six hours" from the mouth of the Jordan River. The company drove its livestock from the mainland across the sandbar to the island and "placed them under the charge of the herdsman [Fielding Garr] licensed by the Mormon authorities" because the eastern slope of the island was "one of the finest ranges for horses and cattle to be found in the whole valley." Stansbury camped near springs located approximately five miles north of the land bridge while he surveyed the lake.32In September 1850 the legislature of the State of Deseret "reserved and appropriated [Antelope and Stansbury islands] for the exclusive use and benefit of [the Perpetual Emigrating] Company, for the keeping of stock." Thereafter, Antelope Island also became known as Church Island because the cattle, sheep, and horses that immigrants used to repay their debts to the Perpetual Emigrating Fund were kept on the island."

29 John C. Frkmont, Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and North Calfofovniain the years 1843-'44 (Washington,D.C.,: Gales and Seaton, 1845), 152-57. On September 9,1843, Frimont and his company took boats down the Bear River and paddled on the Great Salt Lake to Disappointment Island, which Howard Stansbury later renamed Fremont Island. While on the island, FrCmont speculated that both Antelope and Stansbury islands were "connected by flats and low ridges with the mountains in the rear" but left a "more complete delineation for a future survey."

30 Milo Milton Quaife, ed., Kit Carson'sAutobiography (Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press, 1966),89.

"Dale L. Morgan, The Great Salt Lake (reprint, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995), 252. The house, kept in use as a ranch house until 1981, is Utah's oldest Anglo-built house still on its original foundation.

32Ho~ardStansbury, Exploration and Survey of the klley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah, including a Reconnaissance of a New Route through the Rocky Mountains (Philadelphia:Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1852), 156-65.

33Morgan, The Great Salt Lake, 251-53. Morgan writes that, although the island was technically reserved for the Perpetual Emigrating Company, some church leaders also used it for their own stock; "cattle and horses were the essential medium of exchange, for many of the Saints saw no cash from one year's end to the next."

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

The three surviving Bertoches went "to Antelope Island to work for President Young, under the direction of Mr. Toronto," four years after Stansbury completed his survey.34Those who had borrowed from the Perpetual Emigrating Fund often repaid the church by working on public works projects, and the young Bertoches were expected to labor in "redemption servitude" to repay their loan while they waited for their father.35The three did not reside at Fielding Garr's ranch but lived in a rustic shelter built by Toronto.

The first winter on the island was difficult. The Bertoch siblings spoke only a few words of English and they could not communicate with anyone on the island. The boys had the duty of walking around the island every day to check the location of cattle while Antoinette remained in the cabin to perform domestic chores. Toronto brought supplies every two weeks. The three survived on flour, bran, cornmeal, squash, and "bunch grass to chew on." Daniel reminisced, "I had to go to the canyon every day for wood, which resulted in wet feet. For my shoes were so bad that I was obliged to tie them on with strings.'' He remembered, in a letter to Jacques, "our early days in Utah especially on the Church Island when we eat that big Ox.. .. Toronto said the Grando Bovo will Die we better kill him and eat him oh how toff he was I would had good teeth yet if it hadn't been for eating of that Ox and-many other things we did eat makes me sick to think about it now."36

The Bertoch siblings did not record many of their experiences on Antelope Island. Like most immigrants they were "unlettered," and they probably felt that most of their daily activities were not significant enough to record for posterity. But as Wilham Mulder has observed, "The history of

35 The Perpetual Emigrating Fund Ledger confirms that the Bertoch family was initially indebted to the Perpetual Emigrating Company "for the cost of transportation of family from Liverpool to Salt Lake City" in the amount of $296.50.This was reduced by "cash paid on a/c of passages" in the amount of $169.75, leaving a balance "due the P.E.F. Co." of $126.75. Each of the five children was assessed $25.35, even though two of them died before arriving in Utah Territory. See PEF Ledger, LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City, Utah. The Bertoch debt had been discharged when the list of those still indebted to the PEF was published in 1877; see Names of persons and suveties indebted to the Perpetual Emigrating Fund Company from 1850 to 1877 (Salt Lake City: Star Book and Job Printing Office, 1877), republished in Mormon Historical Studies 1 (Fall 2000), 141-42. For more on the PEF and indebtedness, see Scott Alan Carson, The Pevetual Emigrating Fund: Redemption Servitude and Subsidized Migration in America's Great Basin (Ph.D. diss., University of Utah, 1998). Carson notes that less than 2 percent of the immigrants who arrived in Utah during 1854-55 were farmers. The Bertoch children's obvious lack of skills meant that they needed supervision and were best suited for ranching activities.

36Biographyof James (Jacques) Bertoch (c. 1923), in possession of the author; biography of Daniel Bertoch; Daniel Bertoch to James Bertoch and Anne Cutcliff Bertoch, February 14, 1922, copy in possession of the author (emphasis added). Unless otherwise noted, material about Jacques comes from the biography of James Bertoch.

During the summer prior to the Bertoches' arrival, grasshoppers had destroyed much of the crops and grazing areas in the valley and on the island. As a result, in October church leaders moved most of their cattle from the island to new range near Utah Lake. In addition, during the summer of 1854 the Great Salt Lake reached its highest elevation since the Mormons had arrived. For the next five years it was impossible to use the sand bar to reach the island. See Morgan, The Great Salt Lake, 254-55.

34 Biography of Daniel Bertoch.

Utah, as seen through immigrant eyes, is full of significant trifles.'' Daniel's holographic memoirs demonstrate the significance of such trifles. They demonstrate the difficulties that many immigrants experienced in adjusting to their new environment. Daniel wrote that in the spring of 1855

Toronto and myself started for Salt Lake with a piece of bran bread in our pockets. We were trying to find the head of the Jordan River. We came across a large flat boat filled with water, we stayed to empty it, but before our task was done it began to get dark, so we started for the nearest light. We stayed with Mr. Keits at K7s Creek. At breakfast I was seated next to a young lady about eighteen years old, dressed in a clean calico dress. Imagine my humiliation, for I was dressed in a greasy canvas, that Toronto brought from New Orleans. Next day we went back to complete our task and a terrible storm came making it imp~ssible.~'

This storm put Daniel and his companions "in danger of our lives.. .. Toronto called to us to come into the boat, and we began to pray in English. When we finished he called on a Danish boy, and he prayed in Danish; then he asked me. I prayed in French for the first time without my prayer book. It wasn't very long before the storm quieted down and we got away safely." These experiences, which Daniel remembered throughout his life, persuaded him to leave Antelope Island. "The next day we started in quest of the Jordan River, we found it in the late afternoon. We got in our boat and traveled up the river, we camped that night at Bakers. The next day we arrived in Salt Lake and went to Toronto's. I stayed with him long enough to get a pair of shoes then I ran away."38

Daniel found Salt Lake City much busier than Antelope Island.When he realized the church was constructing a temple there he decided that he would rather help dig its foundations than continue to live and work on the island. He labored at the temple block for about six weeks before John Sharp hired him to help dig a canal from Big Cottonwood Canyon to the mouth of City Creek Canyon. Sharp furnished Daniel and his fellow workers a weekly ration of "1/2 pounds of shorts [bran and other by-products of milling], 1-1/2 pounds of flour and meat the size of a mans two fists." In the fall Daniel "went to Sharp for my money, he told me there was no money, only what we ate."39

~aniel-was left "peeniless and without a place to stay," but he was even more distraught when he was told that same day, by a company of Mormon immigrants, that his father was dead and had been buried in Mormon Grove, Kansas. Jean Bertoch had left Italy in February 1855 with the second group of Mormon converts.40After the first group had depart-

38 Biography of Daniel Bertoch.

39 Ibid.

1bid.The second group ofwaldensian emigrants included members of the Malan and Bonnet families from the Angrogna Branch; and Bertoch from the San Germano Branch. The third and last group of Italian converts left Piedmont in the fall of 1855. It included Madeleine Malan from the Angrogna Branch; members of the Rochon, Chatelain, and Beus families hom the San Germano Branch; and the Gaudin

37 Mulder, "Mormon Angles of HistoricalVision," 55; biography of Daniel Bertoch. Large flat-bottomed boats were used to transfer stock between the mainland and the island.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

ed, new convert baptisms had failed to keep pace with the number of members who wanted to immigrate to Utah, probably because Waldensian pastors became more aggressive in their opposition to Mormon missionaries. The Waldensian church also began to discuss and formulate its own program of emigration, which would eventually lead to the establishment of Waldensian communities in North and South Ameri~a.~~During the same year, the Perpetual Emigrating Fund became increasingly strained, the church became "more selective with respect to the type of migrants it assisted,"" and some Waldensians, especially those who were unskilled, found it difficult to leave for America as soon as they would have liked. Some of these returned to the Waldensian church and later settled in other locations.

Jean Bertoch and fourteen other Italian converts probably followed most of the route his children had used one year earlier to journey from their ancestral villages to Liverpool. Bertoch and his group did travel to Susa in a little more comfort than the previous group had because the Kingdom of Sardinia completed its rail lines from Pinerolo to Turin in June 1854 and from Turin to Susa in May 1854.43On March 31, 1855, they boarded the ship Juventa in Liverpool. It arrived in Philadelphia on May 5 without suffering any losses. The LDS hierarchy had selected Philadelphia as its point of entry to save both the time and the lives that were often lost when converts arrived in New Orleans. From Philadelphia the Italians traveled by rail as far as Pittsburgh, where they boarded Ohio River steamships to St. Louis. There they boarded steamships that transported them up the Missouri River to Atchison, Kansas, located five miles from Mormon Grove, where they outfitted for the westward trek. During the spring and summer of 1855 "nearly 2,000 Latter-day Saints with 337 wagons" left Mormon Grove for the Great Basin. Unfortunately, many converts, including Bertoch, died of cholera in Mormon Grove and were buried in unmarked graves near the ~ampground.~~

Daniel was stunned by his father's death, which, ironically, occurred about the same time he ran away from Antelope Island. He decided to swallow his pride and return to the island to rejoin Jacques and Antoinette. "My brother and sister were living on the island. I felt pretty blue and alone in the world. Having run away fromToronto I hated to go back, but I did and he took me back on the island in the fall of 1855." But Daniel

family from the Saint-Barthdemy Branch.This group boarded the john]. Boyd in Liverpool on December 12, 1855, and arrived in New York City on February 16, 1856. See "Emigration Records and Ship Roster,,' LDS Church Archives.

41 See George B. Watts, The Waldenses in the New World (Durham: Duke University Press, 1941).There were twenty-seven LDS baptisms among the Waldensians in 1854, another twenty-six in 1855, and only eight in 1856; see "Record of the Italian Mission," LDS Church Archives.

42 Carson, The Perpetual Emkrating Fund, 448.

43L~igiBallatore, Storia delle ferrovie in Piemonte, dalle origini alla vigilia della seconda guerra mondiale (Torino: Biblioteca Economia, 1996),27-37,101-103.

44 Stanley B. Gmball, Historic Sites and Markers along the Mormon and Other Great Western mils (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 131-32.

nearly perished in a storm as he journeyed back to the island. "While in the lake a dreadful storm started. I was drifted all over and thought any minute I would be tipped over and drowned. I was very frightened so I prayed and then trusted the Lord. I was carried safely to the island and stayed at the church [probably Fielding Garr's ranch] that night. The next day I went on to my brother and sister."" When the three siblings reunited, they realized that they would have to survive in Utah without their father.

Jean Bertoch's death perhaps accelerated his children's assimilation into Mormon society. During the summer of 1855 grasshoppers devastated the valley and the island even more severely than they had the previous year. The winter provided no relief. Daniel later wrote that "the winter of '55 and '56 was a hard one. The spring of 1856 was one of the hardest that the people had to pass through. Many a family had to sit down to the table and ask the blessing on the food and there was nothing but a dish of greens to be seen."46In the midst of these hardships Antoinette left the island in February 1856 to marry Louis Chapuis, a twenty-nine-year-old Frenchspeaking convert from Lausanne, Switzerland. Chapuis had met and befriended the French-speaking Bertoches two years earlier aboard theJohn M. Wood. Antoinette and her husband eventually settled in Nephi and raised four children. Her brothers had more difficulty finding patrons. But they did cultivate relationships with surrogate fathers closely connected to the church hierarchy, who promised them food and shelter in exchange for work. In the fall of 1856 Daniel "started to work for George D. and Jedediah Grant" at Mound Fort, one of four forts built during the 1850s within the present city limits of Ogden. His patrons were at the center of the Mormon Reformation, and Daniel was rebaptized in the Ogden River.

Only Jacques, now eighteen, remained with Joseph Toronto. He moved from the island to Point of West Mountains (near Garfield) when Toronto, seeing that grazing conditions were better near the shore of the lake, decided to relocate his personal ranch.47In 1854 the territorial legislature had begun issuing grazing rights, not only on the islands of the Great Salt Lake but also on the lake shore from Tooele to the mouth of the Jordan River. Good grazing lands were becoming increasingly scarce because of grasshoppers and severe weather. Jacques became the foreman of the new ranch and began using "Jack Toronto" as his nickname. He lived in a oneroom rock building that he and Toronto constructed, and he used an oblong cavern known as Toronto's Cave as an additional shelter and barn.48

Like most Mormons, Daniel and Jack were seized by the events that

45Biographyof Daniel Bertoch. The Garr ranch was owned by the LDS church, and the ranch house was called the "old church house"; see Morgan, The Great Salt Lake, 252.

46 Biography of Daniel Bertoch. For more on the grasshoppers, see Morgan, The Great Salt Lake, 255.

47 Biography of Daniel Bertoch. Point ofWest Mountains eventually became known as Pleasant Green; see Francis W. Kirkham and Harold Lundstrom, eds., Tales of a Triumphant People: A History of Salt Lake County, Utah, 1847-2900 (Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers of Salt Lake County Company, 1947).

48 Morgan, The Great Salt Lake, 256; Kirkham and Lundstrom, eds., Tales of a Triumphant People, 271-72;

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

The author and his son Matt in front of Toronto's Cave, where Jacques (James) Berfoch lived for a time.

briefly disrupted the territory during the winter of 1857-58. Despite assurances made in La Voix de Joseph that there were no internal -. * or external dangers In Utah, the United States Army began marching toward the territory during the summer of 1857. Brigham Young saw striking similarities between Waldensian history and the situation in Utah Territory, and he reminded church members that the Waldensians had shown courage and perseverance in defending their valleys and he encouraged his followers to do likewise. In the fd of 1857 Jack accompanied Toronto to Echo Canyon, where, as his ancestors had, he helped prepare his church's resistance to government troops. With more than two thousand other volunteers, he dug trenches across Echo Canyon, and on the has overloohng the canyon he loosened rocks that could be hurled down at the soldiers.49

Because of the oncoming federal troops, the following spring Daniel accompanied George D. Grant (Jedediah M. Grant had died the previous December), and other Mormons to the Provo River bottoms, where they remained for two months while the army passed through Salt Lake City. After the Utah War, Daniel returned to Ogden, but shortly thereafter he moved with his patrons to a ranch located near Littleton in Morgan County. Jack returned to Point of West Mountains and resumed his duties as ranch foreman.

For the next ten years Daniel and Jack gradually assimilated into Mormon society. They learned to speak English, worked for their patrons, attended church, and married young British converts who had recently arrived in the territory. In 1866 Daniel married seventeen-year-old Elva Hampton, who gave birth to four children before she died in 1874. Following her death he married another British convert, eighteen-year-old

Joseph Toronto, 23. Toronto's Cave is also known as Deadman's Cave because of archaeological artifacts, now deposited at the University of Utah, that were found there. In 1874 Louis Laurent Simonin, a French traveler, visited a cave near the Great Salt Lake (it is unclear, however, whether this was Toronto's Cave) where Indian artifacts had been found. Simonin was shocked to discover that one of two skulls found in the cave was being used for productions of Hamlet at the Salt Lake Theatre. He was able to obtain the skulls from Charles Savage and George Ottinger, and he gifted them to the Paris Museum. See Louis Laurent Simonin, A travers les Etats-Unis, de I'Atlantique au Pac$que (Paris: Charpentier et cie., 1875), 121-23.

19BrighamYoung, "Present and Former Persecutions of the Saints, Etc.," in Brigham Young et al., Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (Liverpool: 1855-86), 5:342.Jacques had undoubtedly heard stories about his Waldensian ancestors who harassed troops loyal to the House of Savoy from cliffs above the road at Chiot dl'Aiga in theVal Angrogna while the troops were marching up the valley to their settlements at Pra del Torno; see Avondo and Bellion, Le mlli Pellice e Germanasca, 99-100.

James Bertoch with his wife

Ann C. Bertoch, six-month-old daughter Ann Elizabeth, and mother-in-law Elizabeth Hill Jones Cutcliffe in 1867.

Sarah Ann Richards, who bore five more children. In 1866 Jack, who by this time preferred the name James, married nineteen-year-old Ann C~tcliffe.~~ She eventually gave birth to thirteen children. Even after they married and began raising children, Daniel and James, who in 1866 were thirtyone and twenty-eight, continued to work for their patrons in exchange for subsistence in kind. Although they wanted to own their own farms, neither could afford to purchase property because their patrons did not pay wages. As long as they continued to work for room and board they did not have any realistic prospect of achieving economic independence or of enjoying "access to the soil, the pasture, the timber, the water power, and all the elements of wealth," as promised in La Voix de Joseph.

When the Civil War-time Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862, Daniel and James finally would be given an opportunity to achieve their dream of farming their own land. The Homestead Act empowered settlers who had no economic resources to obtain free land. Immigrants who had filed a declaration to become U.S. citizens could apply for patents-legal title-for as much as 160 acres of surveyed land. Applications would be approved if homesteaders could demonstrate that they had improved the land-plowed, raised crops, put up fences, dug wells, constructed ditches, built homes-and lived there for at least five years. Before passage of the Homestead Act, it was not unusual for local church leaders to distribute farmland to families who were called to settle in specific communities. These distributions were not recognized as legal conveyances until the

50 Biography of James Bertoch. According to some family accounts James helped sponsor Ann's ernigration by contributing to the Perpetual Emigrating Fund. The same sources repeat family stories that James helped rescue her company when it arrived late in November and was snowbound in the mountains.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

United States Land Office confirmed them, however. Since the Land Office was not established in Utah until after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, territorial residents could not take advantage of the benefits of the Homestead Act until 1869."

Both Daniel and James applied for homesteads almost twenty years after they arrived in the territory, on land where they had labored for patrons all of their adult lives. On October 22, 1873, Daniel filed an application for a homestead of eighty acres located in the vicinity of Littleton, Morgan County. Daniel had lived and worked in Morgan County for the Grant family since 1860. In his application he noted that he had made improvements to the land since 1862.James Ned his application for a homestead of 79.8 acres on June 20, 1874.52His homestead was located near the Toronto ranch in Point of West Mountains, also called Pleasant Green. He had worked there since 1856, and he had lived there with his wife and children for eight years. James built a house and planted crops and fruit trees on the gentle slope of the mountain that rose above the highway that ran from Salt Lake City to Tooele. The United States Land Office granted Daniel title to his homestead on October 1, 1879, and to James on March 30, 1881, afier it approved the final proofs that confirmed they had complied with all of the requirements of the Homestead Act, including U.S. ~itizenship.~~ The brothers had not applied for citizenship until they-realized they had to be U.S. citizens in order to obtain land patents under the Homestead They had lived in Utah Territory for more than twenty-five years before they became citizens and obtained their own property."

The experiences of the Bertoch children demonstrate that converts who assimilated into Mormon society sometimes found it more difficult to integrate into the American economic system. The siblings emigrated from a

51Le~nard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 183G1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 90-93, 249-50. Concerning the Homestead Act, see Benjamin Horace Hibbard, A History ofthe Public Land Policies, 2d ed. (Madison and Milwaukee: University ofWisconsin Press, 1965),347-85.

''Shortly afier James applied for his homestead, Joseph Toronto returned to Italy. He spent one and one-half years in Palermo during 1876-77, successfully converting fourteen friends and relatives who returned to Utah with him in 1877; seeJoseph Toronto: Italian Pioneer and Patriarch, 25-26.

53DanielBertoch filed his Application for Patent on October 22, 1873 and his Final Proof on April 5, 1879. His Application for Patent was approved on July 1, 1879. James Bertoch filed his Application for Patent on June 20, 1874, and he filed his Final Proof on October 16,1880. His Application for Patent was approved on February 12, 1881. See Homestead File 1088 (Daniel Bertoch) and Homestead File 1359 (JamesBertoch) ,National Archives, Old Military and Civil Records Branch,Washington, D.C.

54 In 1873 and 1874 Daniel and James signed affidavits filed in connection with their applications for homestead patents, in which they stated that they were United States citizens. Actually, Daniel did not become a naturalized citizen until April 28, 1879, while James did not obtain citizenship until May 4, 1878. Each brother applied for citizenship because it was a requirement under the Homestead Act. See Daniel Bertoch and James Bertoch Homestead Files, National Archives.

55 An Italian newspaper reporter interviewed some of the family members converted by James Toronto during the same year James was granted title to his homestead.They were apparently not as patient as the Bertoch brothers. They told the reporter that they were disillusioned with Utah and that they wanted to return to Italy. See L'Eco d'ltalia, January 8, 1881. Eventually, one family did return to Sicily and another moved to California. SeeJoseph Toronto: Italian Pioneer and Patriarch, 26.

small and isolated community in Piedmont where they had lived as part of a family unit and a religious community. They experienced a test of their cultural identity when they lost two siblings, were separated from other Italian immigrants, and lost their father. During their first two years in the territory the Bertoches were detached from society because they understood only the rudiments of English and probably even less about their newly adopted religion. Antoinette and Jacques lived in virtual isolation from Mormon society on Antelope Island. Although Daniel worked for the church in Salt Lake City during the spring and summer of 1855, he also spent most of his time on the island. Initially, the Bertoches did not assirnilate into Mormon society because they retained their cultural distinctiveness in their tiny community of three people. They continued to speak French, they prayed from their prayer books, and they remained essentially a Waldensian family.

When the children left the island, separated, and gradually began losing their cultural distinctiveness, their eventual assimilation into Mormon society was assured.They no longer had daily association with persons who shared their language and customs.They began to associate with others and eventually married converts from other nationalities and cultures. They raised English-speaking children, participated in multi-cultural church meetings, and were called to church positions. But their assimilation into Mormon society did not result in their automatic integration into American society, the object of virtually every convert from Europe. Daniel and James did not achieve this second level of assimilation until Utah began its own gradual integration into the national economy and they obtained land through the Homestead Act. Thereafter, they no longer had to depend upon patrons, and they became participants in the barter system that was common in the territory. They owned land, homes, and livestock, worked as farmers, and served on boards of schools and water c~mpanies.~~

New waves of Catholic Italian immigrants to Utah at the end of the century also overcame immense obstacles as they oriented themselves to their new environment and as they struggled to enjoy the benefits of the American economy. It was usually even more difficult for them to find acceptance in some social circles because of their religious differences. But

56 In 1892 James returned to the Waldensian valleys as a Mormon missionary. Perhaps the example of Joseph Toronto, his surrogate father, who returned to Italy twice during his adult life and returned to Utah each time with relatives, was compelling for the fifty-three-year-old farmer. James and his mission companion lived in San Germano Chisone for nine months. In San Germano James was reunited with his cousins, who were prominent citizens in their small mountain town. He visited the family home that his father sold in 1854."The first day [I was in the valleys] I visited Monsieur Meynier and family, my cousins, and was well received, then I was accompanied by my cousin Meynier to my Father's place or what used to be his home which caused many a strange thoughts and feelings upon my mind, the house has not been occupied since it was sold in the year 1854.The house is in a good preserved condition, with the exception of the wood work on the outside"; mission journal of James Bertoch, June 30,1892, copy in possession of author. James corresponded with the Toronto family during his mission but, unlike his former patron, he did not convert any of his cousins. Nevertheless, a number ofwaldensians did emigrate to Utah during the same decade. See Watts, The Waldenses in the New World, 229-32.

they also confronted many of the same obstacles that had challenged Daniel and Jacques in their quest to achieve the American dream. They were few in number, did not speak English, and lacked economic resources. Some worked for the railroad; others became farmers or miners. They lived in temporary settlements in rudimentary shelters (shacks and boxcars instead of caves), gathered to worship, and struggled to preserve their cultural identity in a land where a hostile majority often ridiculed them. Since their numbers were small they eventually associated with, lived among, and married into the larger society. In the process they began to lose some of their cultural distinctiveness. Federal laws enacted to protect the rights of workers helped improve their lives as much as the Homestead Act had helped to liberate earlier immigrants.

When James retired in 1905, he sold his homestead, which he had farmed since 1874, to J. M. Anderson, an undisclosed agent for the Utah Copper Company, a New Jersey corporation, for $6,500. Other property owners in the area, including one of Joseph Toronto's sons, also sold property to the same agent.57After Anderson quit-claimed his newly acquired interests to the Utah Copper Company, the company began to employ some of this new wave of Italian immigrants on the same property where Bertoch had lived and worked for more than fifty years. Like Bertoch, some of these Italian immigrants were protected by patrons and labored for food and ~helter.~'Before long, concentrators and mills replaced James's fields and orchards, and copper tailings gradually covered his home site. Thus, several generations of Italian workers-Mormon and Catholicworked on the land but in different ways.

New generations of Utahns will continue to discover how rich and diverse the tapestry of the state really is as they discover the hidden histories of our state's immigrants. Young Italians, Greeks, Germans, Scandinavians, and members of many other ethnic groups overcame tremendous obstacles to realize some portion of the American dream. For the most part, these immigrants willingly participated in the process that eventually resulted in "their virtual ethnic dsappearance." It was a price they were willing to pay for "a new identity and a new life."59The eventual acculturation of most immigrants and their unwillingness or inability to tell their own stories, make it more difficult for succeeding generations to discover their hidden histories. But the difficulties we encounter in discovering their histories is well worth the insight we gain into the unsung fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters who literally built this state while they chased their dreams and established new realities for themselves and their posterity.

57 These land records are located at the Salt Lake County Recorder's Office, Salt Lake City, Utah.

58 Some Italian laborers paid tribute to a "padrone" in exchange for employment; see Notarianni, "Italianit; in Utah," 307. Notarianni notes that a "paucity of source material may forever preclude a definitive study of the padrone system in Utah." The same is also true for the practice of Mormon patrons who offered board and room to young converts in exchange for labor on their farms and ranches.

59 Rolle, The Immigrant Upraised, 13,10.

Wakara Meets the Mormons, 1848-52: A Case Study in Native American Accommodation

By RONALD W. WALKER

In late summer 1848, a party of several hundred Utes arrived in Salt Lake City to meet the Mormons-members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints-who had settled in the region the year before. With the Utes was their famous headman, Wakara, who had won his laurels not so much by birth or family but by ability and charisma-and because of his success in adapting to new conditions. During the next four years, these gifts were to be amply displayed, and Wakara's interaction with the Mormons may be seen as a case study in attempted cultural adaptation.What were the tests and difficulties facing an able Native American who saw the advantages of a new culture? Could these challenges be overcome? Or was the conflict of culture too great for even a man ofWakara7sinclination and ability?

Of course, this article will only partly answer these questions.The historical sources, slanted toward the Euro-American point of view, are incomplete. Moreover, the first years ofWakara7sMormon relations hardly tell the full story. But what can be presented here is a largely untold account of Ute-Mormon interaction as well as informa- The Ute leader Wakaray depicted tion that suggests that there was cooperation and conciliation between the two peoples in a painting by Solomon along with the frequently cited incidents of CaNalho' a*isf/PhotOgrapher conflict.' for John C. Fremont's fifth Wakara was born about 1815 near the expedition.

Ronald Walker is a senior research associate at the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for LDS History and professor of history at BrighamYoung University.

The best treatment ofWakaraYsculture and routine is Stephen PVan Hoak, "Waccara's Utes: Native American Equestrian Adaptations in the Eastern Great Basin," Utah Historical Quarterly 67 (Fall 1999): 309-30. Traditional and popularly written surveys of Wakara's career include Paul Bailey, Walkara, Hawk of the Mountains (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1954) and Conway B. Sonne, World ofWakara (San Antonio, Texas: Naylor Company, 1962).This article owes a debt to my colleague, Dean C. Jessee, with whom I am working to create a documentary record of Mormon-Native American relations. Jessee was particularly helpful in securing some of the documents cited below. I intend this article to be the first in a two-part series dealing with the Wakara-Mormon connection.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Spanish Fork River in north-central Utah. It is not known when he received his name, which meant "yellow" or "brass." Some have speculated that something yellow attracted his gaze when he was a child. Or perhaps he was so charmed by the color that he wore yellow war paint, rode a flaxen horse, or dyed his clothing yellow. Some said that even his gun had a yellowish hue. However unlikely some of these possibilities are, the settlers spelled his name variously as "Wacker," "Wacarra," "Wacherr," "Wakaron," "Walkarum," "Walcher," or the spelling that whites found most familiar, "Walker."2

At thirty-six years of age Wakara weighed about 165 pounds and stood five feet, seven and one-half inches tall, about the norm for EuroAmericans of the time. His eyes were dark, his hair "black and cut short," and his complexion a "reddish olive" tint.' But beyond these physical traits, there was little unanimity in descriptions of him. One man who knew him well called him one of the shrewdest of men, "a natural man" who "read from nature's book^."^ Others saw him as personable, dignified, and fearless. However, these estimates were balanced by still other reports that used "white man" epithets: He was crafty, craven, and self-seeking, and he had an unusually large head and bandy legs5 Adding to the confusion were the man's religious feelings, which seemed to baffle observers. Known to pray five or ten minutes at a time, he might speak of prophetic dream^.^ According to one narrative, once while hunting in the Uinta country, Wakara became ill, and for more than a day his body lay lifeless. During this experience, according to lore, Wakara was told that his life was not ended; people belonging to a white race would visit him, and he must treat them kindly. As a token of the supernatural interview, he was given the new name of "Pan-a-karry Quin-ker," or Iron Twister, perhaps a suggestion of his ability to resist death.This account has at least this much plausibility: In later years, Wakara made a point of saying time and again that he never had taken the life of a white person, nor would he.7

Childhood gaze: Dirnick B. Huntington, Vocabulary ofthe Utah and Sho-Sho-Ne, or Snake, Dialects, with Indian Legends and Traditions, Including a BriefAccount ofthe Lfe and Death of Wah-ker, the Indian Land Pirate (Salt Lake City, UT: Salt Lake Herald Office, 1872), 27.Appurtenances:William R. Palmer, "Pahute Indian Government and Laws," Utah Historical Quarterly 2 (April 1929): 37n. Gun: Alva and Zella Matheson, Oral Interview, 1968, p. 7, #336, Doris Duke Oral History Collection, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City. According to one pioneer, the chief's proper name was "Ovapah"; see LeGrand Young, "The First Pioneers and the Indians," Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine 12 (July 1921):99.

"Indian Measurements,"August 2, 1852, Indian Affairs Files, BrighamYoung Papers, Library-Archives of the Church ofJesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter LDS Library-Archives).

Huntington, Vocabulary ofthe Utah and Sho-Sho-Ne, 27.

For a sampling of sources, see Lynn R. Bailey, Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1966), 150; Bailey, Walkara:Hawk of the Mountains, especially 13; A. J. McCall, Pick and Pan: Trip to the Diaings in 1849 (Bath, NewYork: Steuben Courier Printer, 1882), 60; Dan Elmer Roberts, "Parowan Ward," 12, LDS Library-Archives; Sonne, World of Wakara.

"Utah Territory Militia and Nauvoo Legion Papers," March 16, 1854, reel #3, #1303, Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City; General Church Minutes, June 4, 1854, LDS Library-Archives; diary of Robert Lang Campbell, December 7,1849, LDS Library-Archives.

' Huntington, Vocabulary of the Utah and Sho-Sho-Ne, 27; Jules Remy and Julius Brenchley, AJourney to

By heritage, Wakara was born a Tumpanawach (also called Tinpenny, Timpanogos, or Timpanogots), a branch of the Ute people that occupied some of the best land in the Great Basin, the flora- and fauna-rich eastern shoreline of Utah Lake. His father had been a minor Tumpanawach leader who, because he had refused to join a local fight, had been murdered. Wakara took his revenge by killing the perpetrators and then fled to live among the Sanpitch bands of central Utah. Using this region as his base, he assumed the new ways of the horse-mounted Utes.

The horse was revolutionizing Wakara's society. When the expedition of Dominguez and Velez de Escalante came through the area in 1776, it reported seeing no horses west of the Green River. However, within several decades British and American trappers were noting "a great number of good horses."' Indeed, mountaineer Warren Ferris saw not only horses but also skillful riding. Ute horsemen "course down ...[the] steep sides [of the mountains] in pursuit of deer and elk at full speed," said Ferris, "over places where a white man would dismount and lead his h~rse."~

Ferris's horsemen were probably Uintah or Colorado Utes. It took longer for Wakara's progenitors, more to the west, to adapt to the animal, partly because the horse was seen as a competitor for scant resources; if a horse came into the region, it was likely to be slaughtered for food. Moreover, there was the problem of caring for the animal. Wakara's father was one of the first Tumpanawach to own a horse, but it died from lack of food while tied to the corner of his dwelling.The Tumpanawach simply did not know "anything of the nature of the animal.'"o

A new material culture soon developed as the Indians of central Utah adopted the horse. Bridles, bits, and saddles were some of the new gear they now used. Instead of the brush-and-pole wickiup, the mounted Indians used the warmer and transportable buffalo-skin tepee. And instead of being confined to a relatively small food-gathering range, the mounted Utes could travel extensively, enjoy better foods, and engage in wider trade. William Ashley was astonished to find the Utes he encountered carrying English-made light muskets and wearing pearl-shell ornaments that the Native Americans said had come from a distant lake." Clearly, these Great Basin Indians had expanded their horizons both geographically and in terms of their personal wants and possessions.

The new horse culture allowed new economic patterns, especially the

Great Salt Lake City 2 vols. (London:W. Jeffs, 1861) 2:345-46; James Linforth, ed., Routefrom Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Wlley (London: Latter-day Saints' Book Depot, 1855), 105; and "High Priests' Minutes, 1856-1876," Salt Lake Stake,June 7,1854,122, LDS Library-Archives.

Dale L. Morgan, ed., "Diary ofWilliam Ashley, March 25 to June 27, 1825," Missouri Historical Society Bulletin 11:181.

Warren Angus Ferris, L$e in the Rocky Mountains, ed. LeRoy R. Hafen (Denver: Old West Publishing Company, 1983), 388.

lo Linforth, ed., Routefvom Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Klley, 105. l1 Morgan, ed., "Diary ofWilliam Ashley," 181-82.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

trading of commodities. Items of exchange might include Ute buckskin, horses and mules, guns and ammunition, and household wares and trinkets. Another key staple was Indian "slaves," usually children or young women taken by the Utes from such weak and impoverished bands as the Paiutes of south-central Utah. These captives were then transported to New Mexico or California by the Utes themselves or by sombrero-clad, gaudilydressed "Spanish" traders, who were in fact usually New Mexicans. Technically, these "Indian slaves" were indentured servants who might be released from their servitude after several decades of service.12

Through some undocumented set of circumstances,Wakara came to personify this new Native American culture. By the late 1830s and early 1840s, his success gave him influence over the southern California trail. John C. Frkmont, who met him and his men in 1844, described his band's skill with more than a trace of admiration. "They were robbers of a higher order than those of the desert," said Frkmont. "They conducted their depredations with form, and under the color of trade and toll for passing through their country." Thus, rather than attacking caravans and killing the teamsters, these Native Americans asked for a horse or two and, to ease the pain of such taxation, sometimes gave a nominal gift in return. "You are a chief, and I am one too,"Wakara told Frkmont, suggesting the two trade gifts without calculating their respective value. Frgmont surrendered a "very fine" blanket that he had secured invancouver, while Wakara apparently reciprocated with a Mexican blanket of inferior grade."

The Spanish-Mexicans of California's rancheros were less impressed with this Utah chief. These men regarded Wakara as a brigand who regularly attacked their thinly guarded herds of livestock. In fact, Wakara's raids were so successful that for a time the road along the Mojave River through Cajon Pass was known as "Walker's Trail."" However, some of the Californians' distress may have been of their own making. According to one Native American account, during Wakara's first trip to California, the caballeros had stolen the band's stock of buffdo robes and Indian children who were being offered for sale. This view claimed that Wakara's later raids were made in retribution.15

Daniel H. Wells, "Narration," Bancrofi Utah Manuscript Collection, reel 1, #36, pt. 2, p. 24; Stephen PVan Hoak, "And Who Shall Have the Children: The Indian Slave Trade in the Southern Great Basin," Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 41 (Spring 1998): 3-5; Sondra Jones, The Trial of Don Pedro Le6n Lujhn: The Attack against Indian Slavery and Mexican Trdders in Utah (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), 33-40.

l3 John C. Frkmont, Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1966), 272; Erwin G. and Elisabeth K. Gudde, trans. and ed., Exploring with Frdmont: Private Diaries of Clzarles Preuss, CartographerforJohn C. Frdmont (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), 133.

l4 George William Beattie and Helen Pruitt Beattie, Heritage of the Valley: Sun Bernardino's First Century (Pasadena, 1939), 66. For a variation of this account, see Huntington, Vocabulary of the Utah and Sho-ShoNe, 27.

"Extract from the Journal of Judge George W. Bean," in Peter Gottfredson, comp. and ed., History of Indian Depredations in Utah (Salt Lake City: Skelton Publishing Company, 1919), 22.

WAKARA MEETS THE MORMONS

By Great Basin Native American standards, Wakara's wealth and routines were opulent. His main tent was deemed "very extensive and e~cellent.'"~ His entourage included as many as 120 head of horses, a couple of dozen goats, additional sheep, cows, and oxen, and what Wakara proudly described as a "performing bull.'"' And his seasonal travel matched his accouterments. During the winter season, Wakara was often in the south, perhaps in Arizona or New Mexico or conducting one of his raids into California. Late winter found him in southern Utah, perhaps near present-day Parowan, while a few months later his band might be at the upper Sevier River, doing springtime fishing. Finally, by summer he was usually back in central Utah in the Sanpete region, still his headquarters. "He is as proud and important as any potentate that ever flourished the ensigns of royalty," said BrighamYoung.18

This, then, was the culture ofWakara when he first met the Mormons at Salt Lake City in 1848.Their meeting left the two groups seemingly favorably impressed with each other. For their part, the Mormons described their Ute visitors as "good-looking, brave and intelligent beyond any we have seen on this side of the mountain^."'^ The Utes seemed impressed, too. According to the Mormons, the visiting Native Americans "expressed a wish to become one people with us, and to live among us and we among them, and to learn to cultivate the earth and live as we do." As a first step, Wakara invited the Mormons to establish new settlements among his people so that the Utes might learn how to farm.20Whether Wakara wanted the Saints to settle near his Sanpete headquarters or in the Little Salt Lake Valley in southern Utah-or perhaps at both locations-is uncertain. In coming months, Wakara and the Mormons would discuss each of these places.

Despite the outward expressions of good will and friendship, it was clear that the two people were separated by differing ideas of rectitude. One reason for the Utes' coming to Salt Lake City was to deal in horses, most of which had been taken in California raids. Although the Mormons bought many of these badly needed animals, dealing in stolen goods made them uneasy, and they sought assurance that the Indian raiding would stop. "We

'"'Life of Henry Lunt," February 6, 1853, 143, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, BrighamYoung University, Provo, Utah (Lee Library).

" ''Life of Henry Lunt," December 14, 1852, 124-25; John Steele to George A. Smith, November 7, 1854, George A. Smith Papers, LDS Library-Archives.

'*BrighamYoung to Luke Lea,August 13, 1851, Indian Affairs Files. Also see BrighamYoung to Henry R. Day, July 2 1, 1851, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824-81, Bureau of Indian Affairs (hereafter BIA), microfilm #234; Wells, "Narration," 23. For another version of Wakara's perambulations, seeVan Hoak, "Waccara's Utes," 309.

l9 Parley P. Pratt to Orson Pratt, September 5, 1848, cited in Edward W. Tullidge, "History of Spanish Fork," Tullidge's Quarterly Magazine 3 (April 1884), 140.

20 Parley F'. Pratt to Orson Pratt, September 5, 1848, cited in Charles Kelly Papers, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City (USHS);Journal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter Journal History), September 5,1848, LDS Library-Archives;Tullidge,"History of Spanish Fork," 140.

are at peace with them," the settlers said, referring to the Spanish-Mexicans in CaliforniaS2l

Wakara parried the Mormon demand. "My men hate the Spaniards, they will steal from them and I cannot help it," he reportedly said. On the other hand, "They love your people and they will not steal from you, and if any of the bad boys do, I will stop them."22 Wakara's answer was clever. While wanting Mormon good will, he also wanted to continue raiding California horses, and he attributed the raids to the "uncontrollable" men of his band.

To his credit, Wakara left the parley doing what the Mormons might have described as "good works." Acting on LDS wishes that

and missionary to the Indians ly sent a deputation to the Shoshones seeking andmember of both the Mormon peace.23A half year later, he entered the Battalion and the Parley P. praH newly established Mormon settlement at Fort Southern Exploring Expedition. Utah, later Provo, on unusually friendly and even intimate terms. As was his usual custom, he had come to the area to participate in Utah Lake's annual fish-run festivity, and he used the occasion to renew the amity of the previous conference held in Salt Lake City. Shaking hands with Provo settler and LDS Indian scout Dirnick Huntington, Wakara declared his heart "warm," and the two later smoked ceremonial tobacco. That evening Wakara lay in Huntington's arms around the campfire, and the Indian leader once more declared his friendship for the Mormon people. Reciprocating, Huntington explained to him the Book of Mormon, the Saints' history/scripture of the ~ativeAmerican people.24

LDS leader BrighamYoung was anxious to establish good relations with the Native American leader. He had been out of the territory when the 1848 Ute-Mormon council was held, but several days after Wakara met Huntington in Provo,Young penned him a letter. "When you see this," Young wrote, "you will learn that we want to be friends to you and will not db you or your people any hurt. We are the friends of the Indians, and we want them to be at peace with us." Also,Young had another matter to lay before the Indian leader-Young was fearful that the region's mountain

'' Ibid.

'' George A. Smith and E. T. Benson to Orson Pratt, December 20, 1848, in Millennia1 Star 11 (1849): 52.

23 Parley P. Pratt to Orson Pratt, September 5, 1848, Orson Pratt Papers, LDS Library-Archives.

24 Dirnick Huntington meeting with Wakara, May 14,1849, BrighamYoung Papers.

men, jealous of their old trading relationships with the Indians, might spread unfavorable rumors about the Mormons. "Go straight to Dimic Huntington and he will always tell you the truth,"Young told Wakara. And following up on Wakara's earlier invitation to have the Mormons establish settlements among his people,Young offered to begin this settlement process but only upon the condition that the settlers would be unmolested by local Native Ameri~ans.~~

Wakara was ready to give such a pledge. The Mormons were his "father[s], mothers, brothers, and sisters," he said after meeting with Huntington and after receiving Young's letter, and he promised that his band would not meddle with the Mormon cattle, an almost irresistible lure to many impoverished Native Ameri~ans.~~ Nor did he want the Mormons to "throw" his people away-Wakara's plea for continuing friendship and cooperation. However, there may have been limits to his policy of sharing. While offering these assurances, he was quoted at the same time as saying that the region's "watersn-presumably the area's vital stream flows-were his."27 Even at this early stage of LDS-Native American relations, Wakara apparently sensed that his people and the settlers might compete for the region's resources and wanted no misunderstanding about the matter.

These events were prelude for the second Mormon-Wakara meeting in Salt Lake City, the first between Young and Wakara. This meeting took place on June 14, 1849, near the Council House in Salt Lake City, likely at the semi-enclosed pioneer Bowery on today's Temple Square. Present were the LDS First Presidency-Young and his counselors Heber C. Kimball and Willard Richards-and half a dozen other Mormon leaders. On the Native American side were Wakara and a dozen unnamed associate^.^^

According to Mormon historical sources, the Native American made another petition for Mormon settlements in their territory, and to encourage the plan Wakara spoke like an optimistic land agent. His land was "good," he told the Mormons. Its soil had few stones, and nearby there was an abundance of timber. Only once before had Wakara seen the land "white," or covered with snow. The area under discussion was probably Wakara's late winter campsite near present-day Parowan in southern Utah.

Wakara's proposal meshed with Young's own hopes for LDS expansion, and he promptly accepted it. After the harvest had been gathered,Young promised Wakara he would dispatch settlers, and he hoped that Wakara would provide a pilot. However,Young's agenda for Mormon and Native American relations involved more than establishing a settlement. As the

" Young to Wakara, May 14,1849, BrighamYoung Papers.

26 Remarks of Alexander Williams, Church Council, May 27, 1849, Manuscript History of Brigham Young, 207, LDS Library-Archives.

27 Remarks of Dimick Huntington, Council Meeting, June 2, 1849, General Church Minutes, LDS Library-Archives.While the statements ofWilliams and Huntington appear in different LDS council meetings, it is possible that both were reporting the same interview.

Meeting with Wakara and others,June 14,1849, General Church Minutes, LDS Library-Archives.

discussion continued, Young suggested a broad-based program of Native American acculturation: the Mormons would build Wakara a house and teach members of his band how to construct such buildings; they would provide Native American children schooling in Salt Lake City; and they would provide Native Americans with grain, help them plow their fields, and give them ammunition for hunting until they learned the arts of husbandry themselves. We are "poor now," Young said expansively, "but in a few years we shall be rich [and] we will [also] trade cattle." As the discussion wore down, the Mormons traded ammunition charges for Ute buckskin, and at better terms than those offered by mountain men traders. Sealing the discussion, the Mormons distributed a gift of hats to the visiting Native Americans and provided them with "half an ox."29

Wakara apparently reacted positively to Young's suggestions. He waved aside the implications of a recent Mormon-Tumpanawach skirmish at "Battle Creek," now Pleasant Grove, Utah, which took the lives of more than a half dozen Native American men who had been poaching the white men's cattle. He also spoke optimistically of his hope that the settlers' children might live side by side with his own.There was reason for accommodation. Even before the arrival of the Mormons, game was disappearing from the Utah range (on another occasion Wakara recalled that the buffalo in Utah had once been as plentiful as the Euro-American cattle).30This decline probably was due to several factors: the climate disaster of several bad winter^;^' the more effective hunting techniques of the new horse and gun culture; and, most important, the ecological imbalance resulting from the mountaineers' invasive beaver tra~ping.'~ In short, Utah conditions were changing, and Wakara knew it. It seemed a good time to accept the advantages offered by Euro-American culture.

In November 1849, about a half year afier the Young-Wakara meeting, Young took the first steps to fulfill the pledged southern Utah settlement. However, rather than a settlement party,Young dispatched fifty-two explorers led by Mormon apostle Parley P. Pratt with the commission to search

'' Ibid.

30 Linforth, ed., Route from Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley, 105.Also see "Indian Measurements" and BrighamYoung to Captain Walker,June 13, 1854, Indian Affairs File; Dale L. Morgan, The Great Salt Lake (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Book Printing, 1975), 110; and Gudde and Gudde, trans. and ed., Exploring with Frdmont, 86.

31 See M. R. Hovey, "An Early History of Cache County," Bancroft Utah Manuscript Collection, reel #7, #5, pp. 3-4; "Indian Tribes and Their Dealing with the Mormons," Treasures of Pioneer History, comp. Kate B. Carter, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1952-57) 4:379-80; and Richard E Burton, The City of the Saints and across the Rocky Mountains to Cal$rnia (reprint, New York: Alfied A. Knopf, 1963),57. Burton cited the severe winter of 1845-46, but by that time most of the large game had already become depopulated.Jim Bridger, always ready with a tall tale, had a variation. He said the buffalo were victims of the huge snows of 1830-31, after which the animals were rolled into the Salt Lake and were pickled for mountain eating; see Morgan, The Great Salt Lake, 110.

32 Carling I. Malouf and John M. Findlay, "Euro-American Impact Before 1870,'' in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 11 Great Basin, ed. Warren L. D'Azevedo (Washington,D.C.: Srnithsonian Institution, 1986),506.

WAKARA MEETS THE MORMONS

out locations where LDS villages might be established-Theparty of explorers, later known as the "Southern Exploring Expedition," carried two items for Wakara: a bag of requested flour and a personal letter fromYoung. The latter, which asked Wakara's assistance with the exploration, had a tantalizing passage. By showing good conduct,Young asserted, Wakara would help "prove that we are the people, whom you have long waited, and look Apparently, like other Native American people, the Utes had a tradition of a coming, redeeming white race, which may also help to explain Wakara7s readiness to embrace white ways.

The Southern Expedition did not encounter Wakara until December 7, when he and a single companion rode into a Mormon camp on the Sevier River. Wakara had dreamed of the Mormons' coming, he said, and had "lots" to trade. Nevertheless, he was less sure about serving as a guide. Several months before, Forty-niner wagons passing through the area had exposed the local Native Americans to measles. Without Euro-American natural immunity, hundreds were dying; in some cases, entire families perished after "one sleep.7734Because of the emergency, Wakara felt that his place belonged with his people, but he assigned one of his relatives, Arnmornah or Ammon, to join the Mormon company. However, before leaving camp, Wakara "astonished" the explorers with his detailed knowledge of the countryside and by his ability to read a map that they were carr~ing.~~

Simultaneous to the activity of southern Utah exploration, the Mormons were taking steps to settle at another of Wakara's locations, the Sanpete valley of central Utah. The valley had received its name from a local band of Indians (Sampichya, Saampitch, Sanpach, San Pitch, Sanpits, or Sanpete), about whom most observers had little good to say. American trapper Warren Ferris described them as "the most miserable human beings we have ever seen.,'" They were in fact a needy and poorly clothed people. Wakara took their measure and reportedly treated them "very cruelly," almost as "slaves." But if a San Pitch man could get a horse, gun, or blanket-the essential items of the new Native American culture-he might join Wakara." Thus, Native American society was flexible and layered, with

33 Young to Wakara, with attachment to Dimick Huntington, November 22, 1849, Brigham Young Papers.

34 For this quotation and the previous one, see Journal of Robert Lang Campbell, December 7, 1849, LDS Archives. Also see Robert Lang Campbell to PresidentsYoung, Kimball, and Richards, December 25, 1849, LDS Library-Archives.

35 Journal of R. L. Campbell, December 7, 1849; diary of John Christopher Armstrong, December 1849, LDS Archives.

36 Warren Angus Ferris, L$e in the Rocky Mountains, ed. LeRoy R. Hafen (Denver: Old West Publishing Company, 1983), 345.Also The Southwest Expedition ofledediah S. Smith: His PersonalAccount ofthe Journey to CaE$ornia, 18261827, ed. George R. Brooks (Glendale, California: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1977), 47-49; and Christian Nelson to Carl Nielsen,April 27, 1859, in Our Pioneer Heritage, ed. Kate B. Carter, 20 vols. (Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1958-77), 11:238.

Adelia Belinda Cox Sidwell, "Reminiscences of Early Days in Manti," in Manti Sentinel, August 16,

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

a majority of its citizens not participating in the equestrian society of Wakara-and most failing to gain his relative affluence.

About a month after the Sanpete settlers arrived, Wakara put in an appearance and camped about a mile from the Mormon fort. He "has been verry freindly," reported Sanpete leader Isaac Morley, "his sick are made well for which he is glad." However, the difficult winter of 1850-51 brought Native American cries for "Tieyup" (food), for which they were "hardly willing to take a In Wakara's case, he had the means for payment. Using Morley as his agent, he asked Mormon leaders in Salt Lake City to send him "breadstuff," along with rice ("a favorite dish with him") and whiskey, which made him "feel good." In payment, Wakara promised one of his horses.39

The terrible winter with its heavy snow resulted in the loss of most Sanpete livestock. Although the settlers themselves suffered from want of food, they seem to have shared some of their provision with the local Native Americans, a "very heavy tax upon us," said one of the pioneers." In March 1850 Morley informed Young of local conditions. He believed that the Sanpete food-sharing had the possibility of facilitating "the object of our mission," he wrote, binding the Native Americans "more closely [in] their good feelings." In fact, the Sanpete settlement, as an LDS Indian mission, seemed to be making excellent progress. "Br. Walker and some of his people express a wish to go to farming[,] raise grain[,] get houses to live in[,] and live as the Mormons do and have their women learn to cook, and work, and learn how to manage Domestic affairs. But how can this be done without feeding them for the time being, and perhaps [giving them] some little clothing to make them decent for to be in company[?]""

Because the Mormons had helped to feed and nurse the measles-stricken Native Americans, Wakara credited them with doing a major service. Otherwise the "Sandpitches would all have died,'' he reportedly said, "and many of his men to[o]."" When the canyon pass to Sanpete opened in the spring,Young sent a large provision to supplement the food already given to Wakara and his band. Credited to Wakara's account in Salt Lake City were more than 300 pounds of corn meal, 10 bushels of wheat, and 25 pounds of rice, but no whiskey.43On that matteryoung was firm. "Big chief poung] says whiskey is not good,"Young told Morley to tell Wakara. "The council [counsel] of our Great Chief to bro Walker is not to drink [it]-&

1889, collected in the Work Projects Administration, Utah Historical Records Survey, No. 20, Sanpete County, USHS.

38 Isaac Morley to Brighamyoung, February 20,1850, BrighamYoung Papers.

39 Morley to Young, March 15,1850, BrighamYoung Papers.

40 "A Short Sketch of the Life of Andrew Purley Shumway,," reminiscent account, 17, LDS LibraryArchives.

41 Morley to Young, March 15,1850, BrighamYoung Papers. Morley to Young, February 20,1850, BrighamYoung Papers.

43 Young to Morley,April 4,1850, BrighamYoung Papers.

pers[u]ade his friends not to drink it[,] and he will have more of the great spirit in his heart." Besides,Young had the nagging fear that the request for alcohol had come not so much from Wakara but from white settlers who wanted it for their own purposes."

No doubt Wakara considered Mormon help during the winter of 1850-5 1 as tangible proof of the Saints' friendship; previously, the relationship between the two people had been abstract and verbal. There was another test. In March 1850 Wakara arrived at Morley's tent to demand Morley's nine-month-old son, saying that he wanted the child to become a member of his family. To the Mormons, the request went beyond understanding.Yet Morley eventually released the boy. It was better to lose his child than "the whole settlement and the boy too," reasoned Morley, who felt that the success of his Indian mission and perhaps even the settlement itself was at stake. Fortunately, the episode had a happy ending. Several days after taking the chlld,Wakara returned him to Morley, but now he spoke of deepening trust between the settlers and his people. It had been, apparently, some kind of ritualized test of friendship common to Wakara's culture, which may have been repeated more than once in Sanpete's first years.45

The spring plowing at Sanpete brought more signs of cooperation. Because the severe winter had depleted the settlers' animals, only one team was reportedly fit for the task. Stepping into the breach, Wakara offered the use of one and perhaps two yoke of his oxen. The Mormons reciprocated by helping some of Wakara's men put in spring wheat? This planting undertaken by Native Americans was likely the beginning of the Sanpete Indian farm, an institution that would assume some importance in the 1850~~~ At about the same time, Arapeen-Wakara's brother-and Arapeen's son and daughter attended Jesse W. Fox's school, the first in the Sanpete Vdey, although it is likely that these Native Americans attended only a few sessions and were limited in their success as scholars."

44 The PDS] Presidency to Isaac Morley and the Saints in Sanpete, March 24, 1850, Brigham Young Papers.

45 The incident is reported in Richard Henrie Morley, "The Life and Contributions of Isaac Morley" (M. A. thesis, BrighamYoung University, 1965), 158-60. Hannah Morley, Isaac's wife, was understandably terrified at the prospect of losing her child; she fainted when Wakara made his demand. For a sampling of such incidents, see Mrs. Pete Hansen, oral interview, 1945, MS 44, box 4, fldr 9, Marriott Library, and Wilma Morley Despain, "His Baby Boy," in Treasures of Pioneer History, 1:150. This last account tells the story with Arapeen, not Wakara, having the central role. Of course, it is possible that these several stories were folk variations on the same incident.

46 Zetta Fugate Dewey, "Harrison Perry Fugate," in Our Pioneer Heritage, 3:114; Isaac Morley, February 20, 1850, BrighamYoung Papers; and Azariah Smith diary, July 17,1850,47, Lee Library. Also see Brigham Young, Remarks, May 19,1850, General Church Minutes, LDS Library-Archives. Relying on reports from SanpeteVdeyYoung claimed that a brother ofWakara had plowed and sowed crops and was breaking wild horses-further signs of attempted Native American acculturation.

47 Amos Reed, Acting Governor, Governor's Message, December 14, 1863, Governor's Messages, 1851-76,86, Utah State Archives.This message speaks of the farm's inefficiency during the late 1850s.

48 J. B. Maiben, "Manti," Utah Sketches of Thirty-eight Communities, Hubert H. Bancrofi Manuscript Collection, microfilm, vol. 1, #lo, 172, Lee Library.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

No sign of Native American acceptance of their culture could have pleased the Mormons more than Wakara's interest in their religion, which Morley signaled by using the appellation "Brother" when referring to the Indian leader. Then, on March 13, 1850, Wakara formally became a Mormon convert and, upon his baptism, assumed the name "A~ist."'~ During the lifetime of a Native American, he or she might receive a series of names reflecting important events or personal characteristics. In this case, the meaning omakara's choice is unknown.

WhenYoung learned the news, he had instructions for both Morley and Wgkara. "We rejoice to hear that [the] spirit of the Lord is beginning to operate upon the hearts of the Lamanites,"Young wrote, using the Mormon name for Native Americans:

And we pray that it may be continued unto them till they are all inclined to do good. The Book of Mormon might be a great blessing to Walker if he would learn to read it, & through him to ma[n]y of his kindred, and this he can do in a very short time if he will apply himself diligently by study & also by faith, and you will do well to instruct him particularly on this point. Secure his attention, & give him all the assistance you can; & also if you have the means to translate [the book] into his own lang~~age.''

Other Native Americans followed Walkara's example. After some stalwart preaching by Morley apparently aimed at convincing the local Saints of the appropriateness of baptizing the Native Americans ("Morley addressed the Saints.. .showing the duties and responsibilities that rested upon us in regard to them as a people. ... both for [their] temporal & Spiritual good"), Wakara was asked if any of his band wished baptism. The Indian leader replied that he did not know, but asked the Native Americans present the question. Thereupon, 126 were baptized and confirmed members of the LDS church, 108 men and 18 women.51

What Wakara and his fellow Native Americans understood by their baptism is of course uncertain. It is likely that most understood the religious nature of the ritual and probably believed that Mormon tradition complemented their own. It is also likely that these new "converts" saw their act as largely an expression of friendship and alliance. Whatever their understanding, the Mormons were pleased. One of the main reasons behind the establishment of the Sanpete colony was Native American redemption, and for the moment the sacrifices of Morley and his fellow colonists seemed justified by success. "We feel confident that no mission to the scattered sons of Joseph [i-e.,Native Americans] was ever attended with brighter prospects of doing good than the one in which we are engaged," Morley enthusiastically wrote Young. "The [gospel] door is opened and

49 Morley to Young, March 15,1850, BrighamYoung Papers.

50 The [LDS] Presidency to Isaac Morley and the Saints in Sanpete, March 24,1850.

51 Manti Ward, Sanpete Stake, Historical Records and Minutes, 1850-53, John L. Warner, Recorder, July 7,1850, LDS Library-Archives.

they are coming in."52

~akara'sinfluential brother Arapeen along with more than a half dozen other Native Americans were the next to request baptism, while Wakara went farther. He sought to be ordained to the LDS priesthood, a necessary step before he could preach to his fellow tribesmen, a goal that Morley seemed to endorse. "Walker is a man of noble mind," the local church leader believed. "He has an Eagle['s] eye, nothing excapes his notice, he some times speaks of men, talking two ways, and acting two ways. Then says (bats wino) meaning no good."53

For the moment, Wakara did not seem troubled by any double-mindedness. Although several months earlier the Mormons had stirred discontent among central Utah Native Americans by harshly suppressing some Tumpanawach and Uintah bands in Utah county-the so-called "Fort Utah engagement"54-Wakara supported the Mormons' action, perhaps because he still had enemies among the Tumpanawach and partly because he understood the brutality that sometimes occurs in war. He therefore worked to defuse Native American emotions and was rumored to have personally tracked the notorious Tumpanawach raider Patsowiete to the Salt Lake Valley, where Mormon authorities put him under arrest and later executed him.55

It would be easy to make too much of these events. Indian steps toward white culture were usually halting and short-lived. It was one thing for Native Americans to understand the need to adapt, but it was quite another to break familiar patterns of behavior in accepting a new way of life. "Ammon too lazy to work like Mormons," said one ofwakara's associates. "Ammon hunt, kill deer, get buckskin, swap to Mormon."56 It was not so much a matter of indolence (although the Mormons often said so) as a resistance to the breaking of traditional cultural norms. To cite but one example, shortly after sowing their Sanpete fields, members of Wakara's band left the area and their crops to pursue their seasonal rounds.

However, there was one force that ineluctably drove Wakara and his band to the Mormons, and that was economic.The Mormons were a market (for Indian goods) as well as a supplier (of Euro-American goods), and in each case the Mormons appeared to offer better prices and quantities than their mountain men rivals did.This dynamic was once more made clear when in May 1850 the handsome young Amorah arrived in Salt Lake City to announce the Utes' desire for another major trading parley. The Indians

52 Morley to Young, April 17,1850, BrighamYoung Papers.

53 Ibid.

54Eventsat Utah Valley are traced by Howard A. Christy, "Open Hand and Mailed Fist: MormonIndian Relations in Utah, 1847-52," Utah Historical Quarterly 46 (Summer 1978):216-35.

55 Church Historian's Office journals, April 29, 1850, LDS Library-Archives. Almost from the start of Mormon settlement in Utah County, Patsowiete had been a thorn in the Mormons' side. In addition, he was apparently a sworn enemy omakara. See Morley toYoung,April21,1850, LDS Library-Archives.

5Rep~rtedin Journal History, February 3,1851.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

"want to make an Everlasting Covt. [covenant] to be friends & for us to be friends to them,"Young explained to a church congregation in the Bowery the next day5' The proposed place and time for the trading rendezvous was the Utah Lake fish-run, andYoung was soon on the road south with supply wagons and an impressive entourage, many men in military dress. When word was received that an even larger gathering of Native Americans was expected,Young ordered from Salt Lake City additional trading supplies2,500 pounds of flour and meat as well as any article in the Mormon capital city that might be available and be of interest to Indian~.~'

The parley began with Wakara and several other Native Americans presenting their LDS "recommends," written by the Sanpete clerk. These of course attested to their Mormon member~hip.~~Preliminaries continued in Wakara's crowded tent when a stream of more than one hundred Native Americans filed in and out to shake the hands of the Mormon leaders, who were uncomfortably "squat down all round the inside."" In attendance were some of the Utes' most influential leaders: the venerable Sowiette, perhaps the most prestigious western Ute; and Carrican, Parravohoe, Orraback, and Sieuincum, representing the Yampa or western Colorado Utes. These latter Native Americans tended to be more affluent and sophisticated than their western counterparts and conscious of the difference.

Despite the presence of distinguished visitors, it was Wakara who led the Native American side of the discussion. Eight of his extended family had been recently killed in a nighttime raid near the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, perhaps by Shoshones or Bannocks, and Wakara was angry and wanted retribution ("If his folks die when hunting something to eat, all right, but he don't like them to be lulled in the nightYy6l).Although Wakara hoped his new Mormon allies might help and even intervene in his behalf, Young had no interest in becoming embroiled in the Inhans' internecine fights and urged Wakara not to "go away and be killed" by fighting the Shoshones. "I understand it,"Wakara replied, without making a commitment.

However, Young's primary interest was Indian assimilation. He once more offered to clothe and teach Indian youth and suggested the need for the older bandsmen to turn to cattle raising and farming. Further, with tensions rising between the Mormons and other Native Americans after the Utah County fighting,Young asked if Wakara was willing to sell his land. "[I] don't want you to buy it, but settle on it," Wakara replied, although there was some ambiguity in his feeling. "Mormons love us, we

57 General Church Minutes, 1845-56, May 19,1850.

58Y~ung to Newel K. Whitney, May 20, 1850, Copybook 1844-53, 51, BrighamYoung Papers. For Whitney's frenzied reply, see Whitney to Young, May 21,1850,56-59, BrighamYoung Papers.

59 For detail concerning the Utah Lake parley, see Brigham Young Office Journal, Book B, Thomas Bullock's Minutes, May 18 through 24,1850, Brigham Young Papers, and Manuscript History of Brigham Young, 203, LDS Library-Archives.

60 Meeting with Wakara and others, May 22,1850, BrighamYoung Papers.

" Ibid.

love them, [but] we are hungry now, but let it rest."62

Perhaps Wakara's words were meant as a solicitation for food, another complaint about the declining resources of the region. If so,Young made no commitment to a policy of food-sharing but instead allowed the rest of the afternoon to be devoted to trading, which Young, perhaps wishing to remain aloof from such matters, delegated to Mormon merchants. That evening the Mormons regaled the Native Americans with hymn singing, which fascinated the Indians because it differed so sharply from their own atonal chants. The proceeding concluded whenYoung stood in a traditional Native American circle and preached Mormon doctrine and peace, ending with a personal display of glossolalia. When Salt Lake City physician Samuel L. Sprague also spoke in tongues, one Native American judged the expression to be Sio~x.~'

Traditionally, the Utah Lake fish run was a time of Native American revelry; dances, singing, fireside gambling, and drinking were part of the usual fare. This year some Mormons joined the good times and Elaimed "considerable bets" after a horse race between Mormon and Native American champions ended in the Saints' favor.Young was appalled and, fearing the loss of his moral authority, announced his immediate intention to return to Salt Lake City. "When the settlers, by their conduct had placed themselves on a level with the Indians,'' the official record stated, "it was useless to ask the Indians to promise to do better than the whites were doing around them."64

There is an often repeated lore among the Mormons that sometime in their early settlement history-the time and place varies with the account-Wakara tried to attack them but was stopped by Sowiette.(j5If such an event took place, it may have been soon afteryoung left the Utah Lake fish run, when Wakara, fortified by merrymaking and perhaps alcohol and upset by Young's refusal to aid his fight with the northern bands, may have turned his temporary anger on the Mormons. This much is known: Wakara left the 1850 conference determined to attack his northern

"

Ibid. Wakara's claim to the land was at best unclear. Such groups as the San Pitches, Paiutes, and Pavants had long occupied and used the lands of their seasonal migrations, and while not having a EuroAmerican sense of land title, these local groups nevertheless had a "sense of occupancy" and therefore had a stronger claim than did Wakara.

63 Excerpts fromYoung's preaching: "We want you to learn to raise grain and cattle and not have to go and hunt and be exposed to other Indians, but build houses, raise grain, and be happy as we are. If any of you have esteemed us to be your enemies, it is because you have been enemies to us, and what has passed this last winter [at Fort Utah] we want forgotten and not have another occurrence, but be as friends and your children go to school and learn and always do right. We have many things to say to you when you understand them, to tell you of your forefathers, who they were, if you stay here a time and trade"; meeting with Wakara and others.

64 BrighamYoung Manuscript History, May 22 and 23,1850,35, LDS Library-Archves.

See, for instance, Albert Jones, "History of Provo," Bancroft Collection of Local Utah Histories, reel 1, #lo, 56-57, Lee Library; Orson EWhitney, History of Utah, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon and Sons, 1882), 1:431; and Edward W. Tullidge, "History of Provo City," Tullidge's Quarterly Magazine 3 (July 1884): 240-41.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

enemies, Young's pleas for peace notwithstanding. It was the first open breach between the two men.

When in February 1851 Wakara approached the newly established LDS settlement of Louisa, later named Parowan, in southern Utah, he was hesitant. Twice within the last half year he had defied LDS counsel by attacking the Shoshones.WasYoung angry? Wakara had even heard rumors that Morley, still at Sanpete, wanted him killed. Uncertain of his status, Wakara sent an emissary to Louisa carrying a letter that Young earlier had written to him about Native American and Mormon friendship. Did the bond still hold?66

While the Ute-Shoshone fighting strained relations, the leader at Louisa, Apostle George A. Smith, clearly wanted the situation mended. Responding to Wakara's wary inquiry, Smith wrote a reassuring letter to Wakara and followed it several weeks later with a letter of recommendation, apparently meant for use when Wakara returned to Sanpete." In turn, Morley sent another letter to Wakara that expressed his good feeling. These gestures were sufficient to induce Wakara to meet Smith at Louisa.

When he arrived, Smith gave the Native American captain a bear hug, and the two men renewed talk of Native American accommodation. Wakara once more spoke of securing a Euro-American-style house and teaching his children Mormon ways? Yet beneath his optimism, Wakara was troubled. The year's raids in California, led by Wakara's relative Sanpitch, had met with little success. And despite Wakara's earlier talk about being "glad" of the Mormon militia action at Fort Utah, he now admitted to a festering emotion. Some of his friends and relatives had been killed during the fight, he said, which made him "sad." When these emotions came over him, he admitted the need to "go away" to gain emotional composure."

This darkening mood was also played out at Sanpete, where settlers noticed a growing imperious attitude among the Native Americans. In spring 1851 Ammon demanded a horse to carry flour to Wakara, who was then camped near Salt Lake City.Arnmon also instructed the Saints to sow Wakara's nearby field. These small irritations became threatening when, after some Native Americans were refused entry to a cabin, they burrowed a hole through its roof and showed what settlers described as "considerable hostility."As a final gesture of defiance, when the Native Americans left the site, they set the corral on fire.70When news of these events reached

"Journal History, February 19, 1851. For the text of this letter, seeYoung to Wakara, May 14, 1849, BrighamYoung Papers.

" George A. Smith to Wakara, February 28, 1851, George A. Smith Collection, LDS Library-Archives; George A. Smith to Whom It May Concern, March 20, 1851, George A. Smith Collection. Smith's letter of recommendation also gave favorable reference to Peeteneet, Wakara's uncle.

Merlo J. Pusey, Builders of the Kingdom (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1981), 83; Journal History, March 3 and 4,185 1.

69 George A. Smith to Brigham Young, March 25,185 1,BrighamYoung Papers.

'' Manti Ward Historical Record, April 4 and May 6,185 1,LDS Archives.

Mormon headquarters, militia commander Daniel H. Wells wrote a strongly worded warning to the region's Indians, including an explicit threat to Wakara. "If we hear of his committing depredations, upon our settlements of San Pete, Iron County, or elsewhere, to such an extent as to compel us to act in self-defence,"Wells wrote, "we shall not like it, and he may share the same fate of Pat-so-ett." The latter, of course, was the Native American whom the Mormons had shot after a brief trial in President Young's

During this period of growing uncertainty in Mormon and Native American relations, both parties seemed to oscillate, reacting differently at different times. Learning that prominent chiefs Sowiette, Arapeen, Unhoquitch, and Wakara were camped beyond the Jordan River west of Salt Lake City,Young and other Mormon leaders paid them a visit. After preaching to them and finding them receptive,Young urged them to be more active in presenting the gospel message to their bandsmen and expressed the hope that the Indian leaders might baptize their followers. In order that they might do so,Young ordained Wakara to the LDS priesthood, while other Mormons performed the same rite upon Sowiette, Arapeen, and Unhoquitch. "They know the meaning of it,"Young insisted after some Mormons raised the question of whether the Indians would be able to recite the usually precise LDS baptismal prayer.72However, there is no record of any of the Native American chiefs using their newly conferred authority.

Wakara himself seemed to work for better relations. Although "astonished" to learn the contents of Wells's bellicose letter, he nevertheless assured the Mormons of his desire for good relations, and to prevent further depredations he tried to move his followers to a distance from the new Mormon settlements. In August, after Morley invited members of Wakara's band to glean the Sanpete fields, Wakara declined. If allowed to do so, he explained, his men would certainly steaL7) But these forthright actions seemed to have gained Wakara little respect. A Sanpete millwright, an employee ofYoung, "kicked" some ofwakara's men out of the Sanpete mill and gave the Indian leader to understand that "I don't fear [his] whole nation."74 Several weeks later, Wakara left Sanpete "in consequence of the Brethren not giving him bread stuff &c for his trying to do Nevertheless, he was soon back, his pique exchanged for a calmer deportment.

" Daniel H. Wells to Peter W; Conover, June 30, 1851, Utah Territory Militia Papers, Nauvoo Legion, Utah State Archives. For Patsowiete's trial, see LDS Church Historian's Office journals,April 29, 1850.

"LDS Historian's Office journals, June 9, 1851; also General Church Minutes, 1848-58, June 9, 1851, LDS Library-Archives.

73 Peter W. Conover to Daniel H. Wells, July 2, 1851, Utah Territory Militia Papers, Nauvoo Legion, Utah State Archives, and Morley toYoung,August 7,1851, BrighamYoung Papers.

74 Phineas W; Cook to Young, August 3 1,1851,BrighamYoung Papers.

'' Manti Ward Historical Record, August 12,1851, LDS Library-Archives.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Young and the Mormons had difficulty understanding such inconsistency, as they assumed, incorrectly, that Wakara's control over his bandsmen was absolute. When Young, now superintendent of Utah's Indian affairs, sent a report to Washington in August 1851, it was full of mistrust. "This Captain Walker has obtained his power, and influence by his exploits[,] being successful in stealing,"Young wrote. WhileYoung credited Wakara for being "a good judge of property, shrewd and intelligent," he also reported that Wakara's "somewhat deceitful.. .intercourse with other Indians" had earned him the suspicion of other Native Americans. Only Wakara's consequent inability to unite the scattered bands of Utes prevented him from committing widespread depredation, Young belie~ed.~Wakarahad gone from being a friend and ally to a potential enemy.

When Wakara returned from wintering in the Colorado and perhaps Gila river basins in spring 1852, neither side appears to have wished for a rupture in relations despite the growing mistrust. "Walker has done some good," reported the southern Utah settler John D. Lee. According to Lee, the Indian leader had recently been among the Navajo, "Moquis, Pemos [Pima] and Welsh [Hopi]" Indians, who after receiving Wakara's favorable report of the Mormons had invited them to come and trade among them. Closer to LDS settlements, the Indian leader had also created "a favorable influence" among those Paiutes living beyond the Great Basin Rim in present-day southwestern Utah. Moreover, when Wakara learned that the local Paiutes had been raiding Mormon livestock near Parowan, he wrested a pony from one of the offending chiefs and perhaps would have killed the man had not the settlers intervened. If the Paiutes did not stop their "meanness,"Wakara promised to inform the "Big Captain" in Salt Lake City."

Young also worked to maintain good relations. After receiving a report of Wakara's recent activity, he sent the Indian an encouraging letter ("We feel good towards you and all the Indians, and we want you to tell them all we love them"). Young's letter also sought more information about the Hopis, whose light complexion and "civilized" husbandry piqued Mormon proselytizing interest. Could these Native Americans be a more promising remnant of Israel than those Indians living closer to LDS headquarters? Finally,Young urged Wakara to continue to walk according to the constraints of the "Good Spirit" and promised a trade rendezvous later in the season at which Wakara would be presented with a suit of new clothes.78In late May, to ensure that nothing untoward might occur at the coming Utah Lake fish run,Young sent word to Utah County settlers that it was his

76 Young to Luke Lea, August 13,1851, BrighamYoung Papers.

77 John D. Lee to Brighamyoung, March 13, 1852, BrighamYoung Collection, LDS Library-Archives. Also see Lee to Young, March 17,1852,Journal History.

78 Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and Willard Richards to Wakara, April 9, 1852, Brigham Young Papers. Thus began a continuing Mormon interest in the Hopi; see Charles S. Peterson, "The Hopis and the Mormons: 1858-1873," Utah Historical Quarterly 39 (Spring 1971): 179-94.

desire that "all the brethren" should treat Wakara's band kindly.79

Despite these exchanges of communication, as Wakara and his band traveled north from Parowan their mood turned increasingly surly, and it is not too ditticult to determine the reasons why.At this point, the Mormon expansion into central and southern Utah-the area of Wakara's migrations-had been limited, but even the LDS outposts at Provo (1850), Manti (1850), and Parowan (1851) had introduced strife due to the cultural differences between the two people. Euro-American agriculture and Native American hunting and food gathering used the land in competing, mumaiiy exclusive ways. Second, there was a question of control; Native Americans were unwilling to cede to the Mormons the sovereignty that the Saints assumed was theirs because of the material superiority of their culture. Third, because the two groups' traditions of social behavior were so different, it was inescapable that there would be tension simply because of their proximity.

However, none of these factors were as important in sowing discord as the question of trade, the lifeblood of Wakara's new way of life. Young's recent letter to Wakara had insisted that Indian trade be regularized ("You.. .have a right to trade with any body, but the United States, our Great Father the President, says white man must not trade with Indian, without our li~ense").~~Young, of course, was enforcing longstanding U.S. Inhan policy, which he, as superintendent of Indian Affairs, was obliged to carry out. In fact, in 1851 the U.S. Congress was in the process of making this point clear by extending to Utah Territory the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834.81The application of the act had previously been unclear because at the time of its passage, Utah Territory had been part of Mexico.

The enforcement of the law would put control of the Mormon-Native commerce in Young's hands and reduce Wakara's autonomy when trading with rank and file Mormons as well as non-Mormons, i.e., the mountain men traders. Wakara appears to have immediately sensed the implication, and he was quoted as saying that if the settlers at Sanpete did not trade "right," he would take countermeasures. The Sanpete official church records reported Wakara as saying that when the Sanpete men left their homes to work their fields, "he would go into our houses, take our guns and kill us While word-of-mouth rumor may have magnified Wakara's threat, there was no question that Wakara was displeased.

For Wakara, these matters were not theoretical abstractions; the Mormons had already moved against one of the traditional pillars of his

Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 68-71,83-84.

s2 Manti Ward Historical Record, August 15,1852.

'Toung to Isaac Higbee, May 28,1852, BrighamYoung Papers. Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and Willard Richards to Wakara, April 9, 1852, Brigham Young Papers.

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economy, the New Mexican "slave trade." When Wakara had been out of the territory in October-November 1851, at least three bands of New Mexican traders had entered Utah with the intention of trading large herds of horses and mules for Indian children and women.83Although such traffic had gone on for several decades, it was the Mormons' first experience with it, and they took immediate steps to stop what they saw as a moral outrage. When one set of these traders apparently defied the Saints by trying to barter with Arapeen, the Sanpete settlers had the New Mexicans arrested and put on trial in Salt Lake City8' While the decision of the two-part legal proceeding apparently released the New Mexicans on a legal technicality (the U.S. Congress had not yet applied the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834 to Utah) ,85 the Mormons were successful in showing their deterrnination to end the "slave" traffic, an outcome chilling both to the New Mexicans and to members ofWrakara's band.

Faced with the prospect of declining prosperity and freedom of operation, Wakara was reportedly "very hostile in his feelings" when the Indian leader met Young at Payson, Utah, in late spring or early summer 1852. In Young's opinion, only the fear of Mormon counteraction prevented Wakara's "open hostility." However, trying to heal the breach, Young presented Wakara with a gift of supplies, which the Indian leader did not acknowledge. Undeterred and anxious for conciliation,Young next entered Wakara's lodge without an invitation. Accordmg to Young's account of the incident, he

talked to [Wakara] whether he would reply or not, heard his complaints which altho' exceedingly unreasonable and without foundation, I expressed a willingness to redress, and inviting him to breakfast with me at my camp the ensuing morning [I] left him. He did not condescend to arise or express the least friendly feeling during my stay, but preserved the most inflexible, dignified, and reserved demeanor. He came over to my camp in the morning in accordance with my invitation, and after receiving in connection with his band a liberal supply of provision, departed I think still entertaining hostile intentions, provided he could bring it about with sufficient assistan~e.~~

When Wakara broke camp, rumors circulated that he was seeking a Shoshone alliance in order to attack the settlers. However, if that was his

83 Deseret News Weekly, November 15, 1851.

84 Jones, The Eial of Don Pedro Le6n Lujhn, suggests the traders were innocent and points to Mormon inconsistency if not hypocrisy in dealing with them. However,Jones's treatment overlooks important evidence, including the New Mexicans' invitation to Native Americans to trade with them. See Isaac Morley to Brigham Young, December 9,1851, BrighamYoung Papers.

85 George Washington Bean, "Autobiography," 72, LDS Library-Archives, and Zerubbabel Snow, Information Statement, US. v. Pedro Leon et al., February 10, 1852, First Judicial Court,Territory of Utah, in Deseret News, March 6, 1852, which declares that a second jury decided in favor of the defendants. While judicial authorities had previously waived fines against the New Mexicans, this last trial apparently restored their property that had been seized during the alleged slave bartering. Unfortunately, records for the second phase of the court case do not appear to exist, making firm conclusions about the matter difficult.

86 Young to Lea, June 8, 1852, Brigham Young Papers; capitalization and punctuation altered for readability.

intent, nothing came of it, and when Young met the Indian leader in the summer, Wakara's "feelings [seemed] considerably modified." Once more Young presented mollifying gifts, and when Wakara visited Salt Lake City several weeks later, there was on his part "lively expression of friendship and good feeling9'-and still more gifts from the Mormons, this time "some clothing."87Young provided these details to his superiors in Washington so they might understand his policy. "A little and determined friendship properly exhibited, oft-times proves conciliatory," Young wrote in a self-congratulatory mood, "when the reverse or even a neglect to exercise a genial influence would cultivate ill feeling already engendered, and result in open confli~t."~~

Wgkara and other Ute leaders had hardly left Salt Lake City for Sanpete County when a delegation of eastern Shoshones arrived to request trade with the Mormons andyoung's help in securing peace with Wakara's band. Deeming this request "a desirable object to accomplish,"Young immediately petitioned the Utes to return for a negotiation. However, Wakara was hesitant, no doubt because of his recent raids on the Shoshones, and at first he tried to parry Young's request by inviting them to meet with him deep within his own territory in central Utah, a proposal that must have bee; out of the question to the distrusting Shoshones. However,Young was insistent, urging Wakara to return to Salt Lake City "if he wishes to do as he ought and is willing to do right and please us."89The situation became more complex when the Utes heard rumors that either Shoshone or Sioux raiders had killed twenty Utes, perhaps in the Uinta c~untry.~'Was the Shoshone invitation for peace a trap?

The record is silent as to why Wakara and his fellow Utes finally decided to return to Salt Lake City, but likely, as with many human decisions, their motives mingled ideals (the wish for peace) and practicality (the desire not to offend Young).Whatever the reason, by September, Utes and Shoshones began to arrive at the territorial capital, thirty-six Ute lodges and twentysix Shoshone 1odges.Young requested that the groups camp on the city's outskirts at a discreet distance from each other. However, some of the Native Americans camped closer. Fifty Shoshones were only a few rods west of Temple Square while an equal number of Utes chose a site on Emigration Square, the Eighth Ward block about a mile to the s~uth.~'

87 "Indian Measurements,"August 2, 1852, Indian Affairs Files.

Young to Lea, June 8, 1852, BrighamYoung Papers. It was perhaps at this visit to Salt Lake City that Wakara allowed himself to be measured and weighed and to have his features inventoried, an act prompted by an official request from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington. He was at the time "37- in[ches] round his breast; [and] 33 in[ches]round his waist." See "Indian Measurements,"August 2, 1852.

89Y~ungto the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, September 29, 1852, in Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Ayairs (Washington, D.C.: Robert Armstrong, 1852), 147;Young to Morley, August 20,1852, and August 21,1852, BrighamYoung Papers.

90 Morley toYoung,August 23,1852, BrighamYoung Papers.

91 Young, "The First Pioneers and the Indians," 98.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

These two groups of Native Americans were apparently charged with the negotiations.

European travelers Jules Remy and Julius Brenchley described their interpretation of the scene: Native Americans dressed in skins and carrying either bows and arrows or rifles wandered through the city's streets, wistfully adrmring the "palaces of the whites" and "casting longing looks" at retail wares. At night the Native Americans "played, danced, sang, and yelled," a cacophony that seemed to the Europeans more like the noise of "enraged animals" than human activity. Even seasoned pioneers reportedly became uneasy because of the numbers of Indians and their raucous ~elebration.~~

When Wakara and the statuesque Shoshone leader Washakie first met in preparation for the negotiations, things at first did not go well. Washahe, angered for some reason, plucked WakaraS hatchet from his breast and tossed it aside.93Fortunately, the actual negotiation, which included the Utes' formal assent to Mormon policy, went better. When asked pointblank about their attitude toward the settlers, the Utes responded positively ("we [all] love you") and once more spoke of their willingness to have Mormon colonists in their midst. Likely the Utes wanted peace and still hoped that a policy of economic and cultural exchange with the Mormons, whatever its difficulties, was still the best path for their people.94

According to Mormon sources, Wakara was at center stage for much of the meeting. He prayed. At another point, he lifted the peace pipe to "Toowats" (which the white men interpreted as "Lord" or "Great Spiritvg5), and he circulated this token to those in attendance.Wakara even confessed to his error in assuming that Shoshone men had killed his friends in 1851, an assumption that had prompted his several reprisals. In redress, he. promised the Shoshones nine horses, to be paid the following year. In attaclung the Shoshones, he said, "I did not do as Brigham told me. I %ill hear now what he says to me: it is good. I was a fool.'' Moreover, in the future he pledged to do better. "He was not going to be the man to cut the peace in two," he insisted.The meeting, perhaps the high tide of his cooperation with the Mormons, concluded with gifts of clothing, ammunition, knives, and "two beef creatures to each tribes."96

If Wakara dominated the Young-brokered Ute-Shoshone council as

92 Remy and Brenchley, AJourney to Great Salt Lake City, 2:291-92.

93 BrighamYoung Office Journal, Book D, October 29,1861, BrighamYoung Collection. For a sikilar anecdote about Washakie that may have been a variation on the first, see Young, "The First Pioneers and the Indians," 98-100.

94 For a record of the Ute-Shoshone council, see "Council with Walker and other chiefs, September 4, 1852," and Young, Letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, September 29, 1852, in Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Afairs: 1852 (Washington: Robert Armstrong, 1852), 147-48.

95 For the Euro-American interpretation of the word, see Gottfiedson, comp. and ed., History of Indian Depredations in Utah, 316,321.

96 "Council with Walker and other chiefs, September 4, 1852," and Letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, September 29,1852.

WAKARA MEETS THE MORMONS

thoroughly as its minutes suggest, this was typical of him. From the time that the Mormons had arrived in the Great Basin four years earlier, he seemed a figure larger than life, dominating events.Yet the inner story of his motives and hopes is harder to capture. He appears to have been the most successful of the western Utes of his generation, making his way by natural talent, intelligence, and a willingness to act upon his opportunities. This last quality was one of the reasons that he sought rapprochement with Mormons, who offered him the advantages of trade and the teaching of new ways. However, his dealings with the Mormons are too full of his good words and works to be dismissed as simple expediency, a judgment that historians in the middle of the twentieth century have repeatedly put forward. Perhaps he may be best remembered as a tragic figure, both in the practical and in the classical sense, driven by forces not entirely in his control, ambivalent and inconsistent because of the conflict between old and new culture, and uncertain of his treatment by the newcomers who, despite usually good intentions, did not fully understand the binding effect omakara's inherited culture.

These conflicting currents made for a harsher future. While the UteShoshone parley of 1852 represented the high tide of the early MormonUte relations, it concealed the growing tension that Wakara and his band were feeling about the Mormons. The Euro-American and Native American contest for the region's natural resources finally resulted in the Walker War of 1853-54, which would disrupt the Mormon settlement of central and southern Utah while at the same time taking several dozen Mormon and Native American lives. During the conflict,Wakara remained in character.Ambivalent about Euro-American settlement to the end of his life (January 1855) he seemed both angered by Mormon encroachment and attracted to Mormon culture. At length, he sought peace. But these events, the second part ofwakara's history with the Mormons, is another chapter yet to be told.

"Electricity for Everything": The Progress Company and the Electrification of Rural Salt Lake County, 1897-1924

By JUDSON CALLAWAY and SU RICHARDS

o single conjunction of technology and industry has so profoundly altered the patterns of life in Salt Lake County as has universal electrification. Not even the internal combustion engine, in all its myriad permutations and with all its attendant wonders and The Progress Company refail woes, has worked such far-reaching social store at 4792 S. State Street in alchemy as has the ubiquitous electrical web Murray, marketing electrical that has been spun during the last 120 years. in its in Murray, Even when the derivative industries of Midvale, and Magna, the compa- telecommunications and data processing are excluded, electrification remains the single nY anticipated the successful greatest techno-industrial phenomenon at marketing~trategyadoptedby work, both historically and contemporane- Utah Power and Light Co.

Judson Callaway has served as collection manager, curator of exhibits, and research historian for Wheeler Historic Farm. Su Richards is chairperson of the Murray City Historic Preservation Board, research archivist at the Fort Douglas Military Museum, and anthropology instructor at BrighamYoung University, Salt Lake Center.The authors would like to thank Sian M. Jones for her editorial assistance.

ously, in the Salt Lakevalley.

The development of universal electrification-as an illuminant, as a source of motive power, as an agency of transport, and as an employing industry-is an historical issue of no small interest. It is also a complex and tangled one, not least during the formative phase of electrification, when decisions shaping future development were made by a constellation of corporate and individual players of widely varying influence, though none were able to direct the industry as a whole. Historians usually give only cursory attention to this period, offering a sketch of the larger corporate players as preamble to the more orderly era of Utah's electricity industry, which began in 1912 with the formation and subsequent rise to corporate hegemony of the Utah Power and Light Company. Contrary to this pattern, this paper approaches the tangled skein of pre-UP&L electrification by examining the career of one minor, but significant, corporate player. The Progress Company is neither wholly representative of nor entirely unique in the annals of early Salt LakeValley electrification, but its career does offer a perspective on this critical era not found elsewhere.

Electricity has been used commercially in Murray longer than in any other part of the Salt Lake Valley, with the possible exception of the Salt Lake City business district. In October 1880 the Horn Silver Mining Company installed an electric arc lighting system at its smelter located, appropriately enough, near the future site of the Murray City municipal power plant. The system consisted of a five-horsepower steam engine driving a direct-current dynamo. The dynamo, in turn, energized two arc lamps, one designed for interior and one for exterior use, which were mounted atop thirty-foot poles. The lamps had been manufactured by Brush Arc Lighting of Cleveland, Ohio, and the entire project was the work of Brush's Denver agent, Charles C. Ruthrauff.'

Ruthrauff had been aggressively promoting arc lighting for some time, but when both the city fathers and the gas company rebuffed him, he focused his efforts on organizing his own company. Several local capitalists, including William S. McCornick, Henry W. Lawrence, Gabriel S. Erb, Charles K. Gilchrist, William L. Hoag, and two of the Walker brothers, David and Matthew, were sufficiently impressed by the demonstration to offer financial baclung to Ruthrauff's project. On November 8, the Salt Lake Power, Light and Heating Company filed articles of incorporation. The new company, which Ruthrauff claimed would be only the fifth in the world to distribute electricity from a central power station, proceeded to

' For contemporary reports on the Brush arc lights at the Horn Smelter, see Salt Lake Daily Herald, October 25 and 26, 1880. Unlike the demonstration lights installed at ZCMI, the Murray lights were permanent, allowing nighttime work at the smelter. See also Brian I? Winterowd, "Murray Smelters," in The History of Murray City, Utah (Murray: Murray City Corporation, 1976), 253. John P. Cahoon and the Miller-Cahoon Co. later acquired a portion

of the Horn Smelter site. The power plant referred to is Murray City's recently decommissioned diesel generating facility located on 4800 South at about 150 West.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

construct a steam-generating plant near the center of Salt Lake's Block 69, behind the Walker Brothers' "Grand Opera House." Three circuits, each with the capacity to light forty arc lamps, emanated from this "central station" to serve several of the larger business establishments along two blocks of East Temple (now Main) Street.2

A month before the electric lights were switched on at the Horn Smelter, on the evening of September 11, Ruthrauff had demonstrated a similar (or perhaps the same) system at the Zion's Co-operative Mercantile Institution's main store near the corner of East and South Temple Streets. The ZCMI installation consisted of two lamps, an interior lamp set up in the hardware department and an exterior lamp mounted in front of the building. For the space of two hours, a direct-current dynamo powered by the store's own steam engine energized these lamps.' This was a temporary affair, however, and it was not until the following April that downtown Salt Lake began receiving permanent and more or less regular electrical service from a new generating station located behind the Walker Opera House.

Thereafter, electrical generation and dstribution increased in Salt Lake City, Murray, and elsewhere in the valley. Owing to the immature state of the industry, the new energy was reserved almost exclusively for lighting streets and large interior spaces, though by 1890 it was also proving its worth in powering street railways and industries. Arc lamps required the incineration of carbon electrodes, which emitted noxious fumes and made the lamps ill-suited for lighting homes, shops, and similar confined spaces. By 1880, incandescent lamps better suited for residential and small-scale commercial use became available, but the digculty and expense of securing a reliable power supply continued to limit electrical illumination to large industrial and business establishments and to the homes of the wealthy, especially in rural and semi-rural areas.

This situation began to change in south Salt Lake County about 1893, when two prominent Murray businessmen, Harry Haynes and John P. Cahoon, built a combination commercial block and entertainment hall popularly known as the Murray Opera House. Behind their new Opera House, the partners installed a boiler and an early-model Edison directcurrent dynamo to furnish steam heat and electric light to the main building. As was the case with many such "isolated" power systems, the Opera House Plant provided sufficient surplus power to light a few business establishments and residences in the immediate vicinity, and it became in effect an abbreviated version of the central power station then operating in

"Utah Light &Traction: History of Origin and Development," an undated, unpublished report prepared for the Federal Power Commission in compliance with an FPC order dated May 11, 1937, 51-52, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City (USHS); hereafter cited as UL&T Report. See also Boyd L. Dastrup, "Electrification of Utah 1880 to 1915" (MA thesis, University of Utah, 1976). Block 69 is the block bounded by Main Street,WestTemple, 100 South, and 200 South. Deseret Evening News, September 13,1880.

downtown Salt Lake City.'

Four years later, in April 1897, the partners joined with John E Austin, chemist at the Germania smelter in Murray, and John P.'s brother and half-brother, Reynolds and James W. Cahoon, to incorporate the The Cahoon family. John P. Progress Campany. They fixed the company's Cahoon, seated on top step, had - -capital stock at ten thousand shares at a par business interests in electriciw, value of one dollar per share. Haynes and brickmaking,merchandlslng, John P. each subscribed 1,250 shares and the other incorporators together subscribed 400 banking, publishing, ranching, more. The five incorporators also comprised and John P. led the the new company's board of directors, with Progress Co. throughout its Harry Haynes, Reynolds Cahoon, and John twenty-seven-yearhistory. James P. Cahoon serving respectively as president, Cahoon, seated at right, also secretary, and treasurer. served as company president.

When Haynes withdrew from the company Chester /? Cahoon, seated in about 1904. Tames W. Cahoon redaced ' 4 him as president. At about the same time, behind John Pyserved as genera' Chester P. Cahoon, John P:s son, joined the managerfromabout1904until firm as general manager and continued to finalliqu~dationinthe1920s. serve in that capacity for the remainder of the company's corporate life. In about 1909

James W. handed the presidency of the firm over to John P., and thereafter, for all practical purposes, the father-son team of John I? and Chester E? Cahoon financed and managed the Progress Company. In January and July 1906, amendments to the company's articles increased capitalization from $10,000 to $250,000 and then to $500,000. The amended articles also authorized the firm to acquire and operate a waterworks, whereupon John P. assigned to the company a franchise granted him in 1905 by Murray City to supply water for firefighting, business, and residential purpose^.^

"Utah Power & Light Company: History of Origin and Development" (January 24, 1941), unpublished report prepared for the Federal Power Commission in compliance with an FPC order dated May 11, 1937,287, USHS; hereafter cited as UP&L Report. In 1893 the Salt Lake Power, Light & Heating Co. became part of the Salt Lake & Ogden Gas & Electric Light Co., which in turn became part of the Union Light & Power Co. in 1897. In 1899 Union Light was reorganized as Utah Light & Power Co., which was absorbed into the Utah Light & Railway Co. in 1904. UL&R became part of the Utah Light &Traction Co. when UL&T was organized in 1914. UL&T was itself controlled by Utah Power & Light, which had been incorporated in 1912. For a detailed summary of the corporate evolution of the Salt LakeValley electricity industry, see UL&T and UP&L reports. Other important sources on this topic are Obed C. Haycock, "Electric Power Comes to Utah," Utah Historical Quarterly 45 (Spring 1977); John S. McCormick, "The Beginning of Modern Electric Power Service in Utah, 1912-22," Utah Historical Quarterly 56 (Winter 1988); and John S. McCormick, The Power to Make Good Things Happen ...:The History of Utah Power and Light Co. (Salt Lake City: Utah Power & Light, 1990).

The Progress Co. incorporation file, Utah State Archives, Series 3888, No. 1831, Salt Lake City, Utah.

At incorporation, the Progress Company The Stairs hydroelectric plant, assumed control of the Opera House Plant, built between 1893 and 7896, but this small and obsolescent facility poorly supplied electricity to matched the company's ambitious future the Progress Company from 1897 plans. The plant's boiler continued for a time until Utah Light & Railway Co. to furnish steam for heating the Opera u I House, but the dynamo was retired almost bought the plant and refused to immediately and replaced by a wholesale grantJohnP.Caho0nysdemand supply contract negotiated with Robert M. tormore favorable rates. Jones, manager of the Big Cottonwood Power Company. Jones had been the driving force behind the design and construction of the "Stairs" hydroelectric plant in Big Cottonwood Canyon, the first important hydroelectric project to become operational in the Salt Lake Valley. Under the terms of this agreement, the Progress Company purchased, at wholesale rates, about one-quarter of the Stairs's 2,000-kilowatt output. The electricity, in the form of three-phase alternating current, was delivered to Murray via a 10,000-volt transmission line owned by the Big Cottonwood Power Company but constructed at the expense of the Progress C~mpany.~

As recorded in the articles of incorporation and in much of the company's advertising and stationery, the company's official style included the definite article (The Progress Company). See also R. Ray Rasmussen, "A Town Begins," in The History of Murray City, Utah, and entries under "Progress Co." and "Electricity Companies" in the 1899 through 1924 editions of the Polk directories for Salt Lake City. The company's venture into municipal water service was not a success, and in 1910, under pressure from Murray City to either improve its service or forfeit its franchise, the company sold its mains and pumping plant to the city for $27,000.

Salt Lake Tribune,January 1, 1898. See also UP&L Report, Appendix, 288. The 1898 edition of the

It appears from the available evidence that The Germania Smelter, shown at the Progress Company intended to retail ~e~oneofthe~argestsme~ting electricity to the several smelters and other operations in sanLake county high-volume industrial consumers then oper- when the Progress Company was ating at or near Murray. Austin's Germania was the largest of these, but in 1897 there

organized in 1897. Two years were at least three other smelters of signifi- late', the Germania was 'lased cant size in south Salt Lake Valley: the anditso~eratjonsmovedtothe Hanauer, also located at Murray; and two AmericanSmeltingandRefining Sandy smelters, the Conklin and the ~o~~snew~urr~p/ant,atrjght Pennsylvania (formerly the Mingo) In addi- of photo. tion, at least two ore sampling ds were also in operation: the Pioneer at Sandy and the Taylor and Brunton at Murray. These facilities did not represent the full potential of the south valley electricity market. In 1899 the Standard Oil Company backed the organization of the American Smelting and Refining Company to consolidate that part of the American smelting industry not already under the control of the Guggenheim family. Under the corporate moniker of "ASARCO," the new super-company acquired both the Germania and the Hanauer and began negotiating with Sandy City for a site at which to locate its consolidated operations. Alarmed at the pending loss of the Germania and Hanauer's pay and tax rolls, the business cornrnunity at Murray organized an ad hoc committee that, in 1901, embarked upon a campaign to persuade ASARCO's management to locate its new

Sanborn insurance map of Murray shows the Opera House Plant with a notation indicating that at that time the boiler was being used only for heating purposes. The 1911 edition shows the old power plant building considerably modified and without the boiler. A revised notation indicates that the building was being then used as a warehouse. See also James W: Cahoon to R. Ray Rasmussen, Murray City Recorder, October, 15, 1935, Murray City Recorder's Office; and Charles L. Keller, Tlze Lady in the Ore Bucket: A History of Settlement and Industy in the Tri-Canyon Area of the Wasatch Mountains (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001), 241-48.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

plant near Murray. Under the chairmanship of James W. Cahoon, the committee assembled a package of financial incentives that convinced the smelter company to select a site on Little Cottonwood Creek, adjacent to the existing Germania works. At the same time, but apparently without the intervention of the Cahoon committee, the Highland Boy Gold Mining Company also elected to construct a new smelter near Murray at which to process ore taken from its Bingham Canyon mine.7

The Progress Company's marketing of electricity to large-consumption industrial clients was curtailed, however, when the Pioneer Electricity Company of Ogden and the Utah Power Company of Salt Lake City secured contracts to supply the Pennsylvania and other south Salt Lake County smelters. Only the Germania appears to have purchased its electricity from the Progress Company-and it is unclear whether ASARCO continued to do business with the company afier it moved the Germania's operations to the new Murray site.

If, however, the company was disappointed by the customers it did not attract, it was equally disappointed by those it did. In a letter written in 1935 to the Murray City Recorder, James W. Cahoon explained that "orders to connect houses were so heavy that our outlays were much heavier than our receipts so when Murray was incorporated we went to the first council and laid our case before them and said we [thought] the business should belong to the city."8 James W.'s chronology is questionable. The first session of the new Murray City Council convened in January 1903, but the council minutes do not mention an offer to sell the Progress Company until the following June. At that time, the company's secretary, John F? Cahoon, presented a verbal offer and repeated it in writing three months 1ater.The asking price was $10,000, the full amount of the company's authorized capitalization, payable in annual installments of $1,000 each. The failure to attract high-volume industrial consumers, coupled with the unprofitability of servicing low-volume residential consumers, appears to have seriously dampened the incorporators' interest in the electricity business. Mayor Chilion L. Miller and the city council were not impressed and took no action until May 1904, when they declined "on account of other expenses the city was e~pecting."~

John p's enthusiasm for the business soon revived, however, and from 1905 onward he initiated a series of projects that made the Progress Company one of the most extensive electricity concerns operating in south Salt Lake County. In December he obtained franchises from Salt Lake

' Winterowd, "Murray Smelters," 252-54. See also Cahoon to Rasmussen; Edgar M. Ledyard, "Early Mining and Smelting South of Salt Lake City," Ax-I-Dent-Ax 16 (May 1935),8; Gary B. Hansen, "Industry of Destiny: Copper in Utah" Utah Historical Quarterly 31 (Summer 1963): 262-79; and "History of Smelting in the Salt Lakevalley,"unpublished typescript (n.a., n.d.), USHS.

Cahoon to Rasmussen.

Murray City Council Minute Book A, Minute No. 387, June 9, 1903; Minute No. 657, September 15,1903; Minute No. 945, May 3,1904.

County and Murray City authorizing the The Bennion & Sons flour mi//, an company t 0 string power lines along public intermediate-sin, industria/ oDerrights of way. lo The company constructed two in Murray, exterior and intehydroelectric plants on Big Cottonwood rior. TheuseofelectriCityiS Creek, one at State Street and the other at 900 E&. These, and a third plant owned in much in evidence in these phopartnership with Rudolph Knudsen, gave the tographs=The Bennions company a generating capacity of about 375 their small hvdroelectric plant on kilowatts. In about 1910 the purchase of the theJordanRivertotheProgress Hyrum Bennion and Sons hydroelectric cowin about 1910. plant on the Jordan River added another 75 kilowatts of generating capacity.l1

The new plants reduced but did not eliminate the company's dependency on wholesale suppliers for its electricity.At the same time, the plants on Big Cottonwood created the opportunity for expensive legal problems. Early in 1907 Salt Lake City began diverting water from Big Cottonwood Creek, an action that John P. believed infringed on rights previously appropriated to the Progress Company. In February he initiated a lawsuit against the city and about four hundred individual and corporate Big Cottonwood water users in an effort to "quiet and confirm" the company's title to the disputed water.The litigation continued in the Third District and Utah Supreme Courts until 1918 but failed to uphold John Pls most important claims.12 By one estimate, litigat-

lo Murray City Council Minute Book A, December 12, 1905,247; and Ordinances and Resolutions of Murray City 1903-12, Chapter 31, 103-105. See also Salt Lake County Commission, Minute Book 0, November 27,1905,94, and December 18,1905,111-12, hereafter cited as Minute Book 0.

" UP&L Report, Appendix, 289-92. For a description of the company's hydroelectric plants, including details of construction, equipment, estimated value, and performance, see the testimony of defense witness Oscar H. Skidmore in Appellant's Abstract of Record, The Progress Company and Rudolph Knudsen v. Salt Lake City et al., Utah Supreme Court, Utah State Archives, Series 1489, No. 2831,929-33.

l2 Appellant's Abstract of Record, The Progress Company and Rudolph Knudsen v. Salt Lake City et al., 2-197. See also Utah Supreme Court, Progress Co. v. Salt Lake City et al. (No. 3851), West Pacijlc Reporter, 1st Series, 173 Uune 6,1918): 705.

ing the "Progress Case" cost John l? and his Utility poles in Murray about 1908. company $56,000.~~

Despite this, the company continued to enlarge its sphere of operations. It extended service to Midvale in 1910 and to Magna in 1916. The companv's transmission and distri-

The transformers on the pole line along the far (west) side of State Street are characteristic of a transmission line for alternating I4 bution facilities came to include several sub- current- The line ce*ainly stations and 111 miles of pole lines that belongedtotheProgressCowebbed the valley south of Salt Lake City."

But its dominion over this extensive territory did not go unchallenged. In 1911 the Utah County Light and Power Company completed a transmission line between its plant at Alpine and Midvale, where it built a distribution system to rival that of the Progress Company. The interloper then undercut the Progress Company's rates and forced Chester Cahoon to respond by "[giving] the lights away for a year and a halfS7'TheMidvale rate war ended when the Knight Consolidated Power Company acquired the Utah County company in 1912 and increased its rates in the Midvale district to conform to a company-wide standard.15

As costly as it was to "give the lights away" in Midvale, the rate war probably caused less damage to the Progress Company than did Murray City's decision to form its own power company. Eight years after Mayor Miller and the city council had declined John l? Cahoon's offer to sell the company, both sides had reconsidered their positions. The city administration now favored the municipal ownership of utilities, but Cahoon had lost interest in liquidating his company.

In the case of John P. Cahoon, the change of heart no doubt reflected both the substantial investment he had made in his company since 1904 as well as a new vision of its role vis-a-vis other Cahoon business interests. At this time, John P. held a controlling interest in the Salt Lake Pressed Brick

l4 UP&L Report, 35, and Appendix, 290-92.

l5 UP&L Report, Appendix, 290-91.

l3 Claire Georgene Cahoon Evans, "John Pulaski Cahoon," unpublished biographical sketch (1968), USHS.

Company (incorporated in 1891) and was a stockholder and member of the board of the Mill Creek Power Company (incorporated in 1906). He joined in the organization of the Mill Creek company after Utah Light and Railway, successor to the Big Cottonwood Power Company, refused to renew the Progress Company's supply contract on terms more favorable to the Murray company. It appears that Cahoon had originally intended to use one or more of his hydroelectric plants on Big Cottonwood Creek to supply electricity to the SLPB's brickyard in Mill Creek over the transmission line authorized by Salt Lake County in December 1905. The county franchise permitted a pole line running north on State Street from the limits of Murray City to 1400 South (now 3300 South), thence east to 1100 East, and thence north to a point opposite the brickyard.With the impending termination of the Utah Light and Railway contract, John F? took a new tack and arranged for SLPB to purchase the Mill Creek company's entire output. This was delivered to a substation at the brickyard, and the electricity not required for brick-making was forwarded via the 1100 East-1400 South-State Street transmission line to Murray.16

As for Murray City, its change of policy was due, at least in part, to the triumph of two Socialist candidates in the municipal elections of 1911.The successful candidacies of George A. Huscher for mayor and Gottlieb Berger for one of two city commission seats placed the Socialists in a favorable position to act on one of their primary political objectives: public ownership of public services.'' However, the Socialists were not alone in supporting municipal power. The previous city administration had taken an important step in that direction by hiring engineer C. E. Ingersol to study the feasibility of a municipally owned and operated power system. Ingersol's report was encouraging, but the city took no action until 1912, when Mayor Huscher proposed a $60,000 bond issue to fund a city-owned power system. In a special election held on July 30, voters approved the bond issue. With funding secured, the city purchased a power site on Little Cottonwood Creek, ordered machinery, and built a generator house, transmission lines, and substations.18Work progressed steadily through 1913, and on December 20 the city directed the Progress Company to disconnect its lines from the city's distribution system.l9

The company did not welcome the loss of Murray City's business, but neither would it suffer a severe setback. By one estimate, charges for street and miscellaneous lighting in 1912 amounted to $2,700-an important

l6 Minute Book 0, 111-12; Salt Lake Tribune, August 16, 1906; UP&L Report, 288; and Thomas G. Alexander, "In the Shadow of the Brickman: Interstate Brick Company and its Predecessor, 1891-1975," typescript (nd), USHS.

"John S. McCorrnick and John R. Sillito, "Respectable Reformers: Utah Socialists in Power, 1900-1925,'' in A World We Thought We Knew: Readings in Utah History, ed. McCorrnick and Sillito (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995), 122-25.

'' Rasmussen, "A Town Begins," 46-54.

l9 UP&L Report, Appendix, 291.

At left: George A. Huscher, Socialist mayor of Murray City and champion of a municipally owned electricity plant. When asked what he proposed to do with the Progress Co., Mayor Huscher reportedly replied, "I will do with them as if they were not in existence," which is about what he did. Right: Gottlieb Berger, Murray City councilman, Socialist, and Huscher ally.

sum, but its loss was offset by income received from several high-volume clients, including the Western Fire Clay Company, the Bennion flour mill, a planing mill, the Miller-Cahoon Company, and Salt Lake County, as well as from an increasing number of low-volume commercial and residential

The appearance of yet another competitor, however, would increasingly pose a more serious challenge. The Progress Company served a sizable geographic area with a large customer base; in the Magna-Pleasant Green district alone, its wires would eventually connect to almost 700 homes and businesses, but it did not have this territory to itself.21No sooner had the rate war with Utah County Light and Power ended than a new and more formidable foe hove into view. The Utah Power and Light Company was organized in 1912 expressly to consolidate independent companies. By 1913, with generous financial backing from General Electric, UP&L had acquired several important local companies, including Telluride Power and Knight Consolidated Power, and in 1915 it gained control of the electrical properties of Utah Light and Traction (formerly Utah Light and Railway). Thereafter, UP&L was in a position to dictate wholesale rates to its few remaining competitors, including the Progress Company."

John F? anticipated the threat that both Murray City and larger companies posed and, knowing that the loss of hundreds of industrial, commercial, and residential customers would be a serious matter, he responded with a vigorous campaign against the Murray City power project and its bond issue. In the view of at least some of the project7s supporters, including Murray physician Frank M. McHugh, the "Progress crowd" responded too vigorously by employing tactics that included personal intimidation, the propagation of false and misleading information, manipulation of money

20 Rasmussen,"A Town Begins," 50.

" UP&L Report, Appendix, 292.

'* McCormick, "The Beginning of Modern Electric Power Service," 7-12, and UP&L Report, 51-59.

Murray City's hydroelectric planf, which became operational in December 1913.

markets, discriminatory business practices, and fraud. In an article published two years after the bond issue was approved, Dr. McHugh (otherwise known to history for his part in the Joe Hill affair) (I)

praised the Murray power project and denounced its opponents-especially John F? Caho~n.~~

Whether or not John Ps methods justified McHugh's critique is a matter for further study. It is difficult in retrospect, and with the information available, to confirm or refute his accusations-although certainly nothing in the doctor's catalogue of skullduggery was unknown to the politics of the day. The fact, however, that in July 1914 the Murray City Commission directed the city attorney to consult with the Utah attorney general to determine if the Progress Company had violated the state's fair business statute suggests that others besides Dr. McHugh questioned the propriety of the company's rneth~ds.~'

Resentment was by no means limited to the supporters of municipal power. There was no shortage of ill feeling on the side of the Progress Company, as is evident in this passage from a letter James W. Cahoon wrote to R. Ray Rasmussen more than two decades after approval of the power plant bond issue:

In 1908 when [Mayor] Huscher talked of bonding for a plant, a committee called on him and asked him what he proposed to do with the Progress Company who had been encouraged to spend their money and build up a business. His reply was, "I will do with them as if they were not in existence."The bonds were voted and I can prove that those who voted the bonds paid less than 5% of the taxes of this town. At that time, I was one of the heaviest taxpayers in Murray City. The following year, I paid on all my property ten mills, the following year seven mills, and the third year five mills to [keep] the plant running.25

23 Frank M. McHugh, "The Murray Power Plant: An Experiment in Municipal Ownership," Utah Survey 3 (December 1915). Frank and Olivia McHugh immigrated to Utah in 1910 from their native Kentucky and settled in Murray, where they became active members of the Utah Socialist party. In 1912 Frank stood as the party's candidate for governor, and Olivia ran as its candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction. Neither bid was successftil.The McHughs had no interest in Socialists before coming to Murray, but the success of the city's power project so impressed the politically aware couple that they enlisted in the party's cause. For a discussion of Dr. McHugh's part in the arrest and subsequent prosecution of Joe Hill, see Gibbs M. Srnith,]oe Hill (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1969), 63-66, 73-75.

24 Rasmussen, "A Town Begins," 54.

25 Cahoon to Rasmussen.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

It should be noted that the bond issue was approved in 1912, not 1908, as James W. recalled. Moreover, it is not possible with available information to verifi his statement that the issue was approved by those voters who paid the least tax. Mr. Cahoon evidently believed that the city should be governed like a business corporation, with voting privileges proportionate to capital invested; small wonder he and Socialists like Huscher and ~er~er found themselves at odds. Events had taken an ironic turn to which he remained unreconciled two decades later: Through the normal workings of democratic government, James W: was compelled to support, through taxes, a municipal power scheme that seriously compromised the survival of his own firm.

Even in the prevailing atmosphere of resentment and suspicion, the Progress Company and the new Murray City power company found areas of profitable cooperation. In December 1913, as they were ordering the Progress Company disconnected from the city's distribution system, the city commissioners also authorized two important agreements between their company and its private sector rival. The first of these agreements permitted the sale of surplus electricity to the Progress Company, and-the second provided for the sharing of utility poles. Later, in September 1918, the competitors also established a protocol deahng with the problem created when the customers of one company switched to the other without first settling their outstanding accounts.26

That the two companies could come to an understanding on this issue indicates two things: first, the extent and seriousness of the problem, for obviously each side believed it gained no advantage from the situation; and second, the importance both parties attached to residential and small business customers. The large number of orders to connect homes-which James W. had cited as the reason for offering to sell the company in 1903had now become the bread-and-butter business of both the private and the public concerns. In the years following the advent of public power in Murray, the formerly discounted residential and small business markets had assumed new importance.

In about 1910, D. Branson Brinton, a recently graduated electrical engineer from the University of Utah, joined the Progress Company as an electrician." Brinton assumed responsibility for the company's Murray district, which included managing an electrical merchandise store located, along with the firm's general offices, at 4792 S. State Street in Murray. Once in charge, Brinton quickly demonstrated that he was no less adept in the arts of the merchant than he was skilled in the sciences of the electrician.

During the early years of the twentieth century, electricity suppliers

2~asmussen,"A Town Begins," 54.

'' Information on D. Branson Brinton and the Brinton Electric Co. has been provided by Mr. Brinton's son Marshall K. Brinton through several informal conversations with the authors and in one formal interview conducted by the authors on April 15, 1999, at Wheeler Historical Farm.

The Brinton Electric Company. D. Branson Brinton, founder, stands at left with WilliamA. Winger,a member of his sales staff.

provided their customers with the basic supplies required to use the new form of energy. This was especially true in rural and semi-rural areas, where homeowners, petty merchants, farmers, and similar low-volume consumers did not have convenient access to these highly specialized goods. It was not common at that time, however, for electricity companies to also sell electricity-using appliances. To the extent such devices were available at all, conventional retailers usually handled these durable goods as an adjunct to traditional lines of merchandise.

It is not clear if Brinton's position as merchant-electrician was the cause or the effect of what happened next, but there is no doubt that his arrival at the Progress Company coincided with a new approach in its marketing. At about this time, the company began offering for sale, in addition to light bulbs, fuses, and other consumables, durable electrical goods. At the time, lighting was by far the most common, and in most instances the only, domestic use of electricity. By filling the homes of its customers with all manner of electricity-consuming appliances, the Progress Company hoped to stimulate demand for its primary product. The managers adopted the theory of consumption-based marketing: Increase the demand for a primary product (in this case, electricity) by increasing that product's secondary uses. Utah Power and Light would later apply this strategy with considerable success.28

The strategy would provide little benefit to the Progress Company-but not for want of effort on the part of the company's man in Murray. Mr. Brinton's salesmanship, in fact, proved so effective that in 1921 he and a partner purchased the Progress Company's merchandising operation. The partnership dissolved the following year to be replaced by the Brinton Electric Company, which continued under two generations of family management into the 1990s. The Brinton company motto, which like its merchandise, business premises, and clientele, had been taken over from the Progress Company, reflected the new marketing philosophy: "Electricity for Everything, Everything for Electricity.''

For the Progress Company, however, consumption-based marketing

28 McCormick, History of Utah Power and Light.

Apex ccsuctioncleaner" advertising circular. In an effort to increase demand for electricity, the Progress Co. marketed the Apex and other electrical appliances to households in south Salt Lake County.

proved to be too little, too soon. In 1910 few home electrical appliances existed, and those few too often proved to be expensive, inefficient, and unreliable. Moreover, though most customers had come to accept the advantages of electric light in the home, the value (or even the propriety) of machines performing common household tasks (so-called 6 6women's work") remained

suspect.29Given the entrenched attitudes respecting the relative economic worth of male vis-a-vis female labor that prevailed at the beginning of the twentieth century, market acceptance of such devices required time and a considerable investment in both product development and promotion. Heavily capitalized companies like UP&L could afford such investments, but not so the Progress Company. It began the battle to fill south Salt Lake County homes with all manner of electric appliances, but others would garner the spoils.

At the time Murray voters approved funding for a city-owned power system, electricity was ceasing to be a novelty in the urbanized parts of Salt Lake County. In the county's farming districts, however, the novelty was still all too fre~h.'~Electricity'sarrival at individual rural homes and

23,ee Leah D. Widtsoe, "Labor Saving Devices for the Farm Home," Utah Agricultural College Experiment Station Circular No. 6 oune 1912).A prominent Utah educator,Widtsoe was an early leader in what came to be called the home economics movement. In "Labor Saving Devices," she discusses and challenges the prevailing social attitudes of that day toward "women's work." Her thesis is that the labor of farm women in the home was equal in value to the labor of farm men in the field. Therefore, if an investment in labor-saving farm machinery was justified on economic grounds, the same applied to labor-saving household machines.

30 Thirteenth Census ofthe United States Taken in theyear 1910 (Washington,D.C.: Bureau of the Census): Vol I, ccPopulation1910" (1913);"Abstract of the Census with Supplement for Utah" (1913);and "Central Electric Light and Power Stations.. .l912) (Bulletin 124, 1914). Census data do not provide direct

farmsteads represent installments in an ongoing drama, and in many instances has lodged as firmly in the memory of the actors as the births, marriages, and deaths of relatives and friends. Often, it was the Progress Company that supplied the electricity, but, regrettably, the company records are no longer available to tell this story and the history must be recovered from family recollections.

One such recollection is preserved in a biographical sketch of James Theodore Erekson written in 1966 by the subject's daughter Mary Fern:

April 14, 1914, was an eventful day in the Erekson home. This was the day that the electric lights were turned on in all of the rooms. It also marked the end of the refilling of the kerosene lamps, the trimming of the wicks and the washing and polishing of lamp chimneys, which was always a Saturday task.The electric power was furnished by the Progress Company, James Theodore standing the expense of the pole line in from 5900 South to his home. However, part of the amount paid was deductible in electric ~ervice.~'

The reminiscence mentions only house lighting, with no reference to electricity being installed in the farm's outbuildings or being used for farming or household chores. This agrees with the pattern of consumer behavior mentioned earlier: Electricity was applied first to illumination and only later used for motive power and other purposes.

Mary Fern's account of dispensing with kerosene lamps is at odds with other first-person recollections, including the following statement made in the 1930s by Chester F? Cahoon:

Today we hardly know what an outage is but in those days we had many lasting from one to twenty-four hours. Most of the time we were overloaded and lights were just a red glow. Everyone kept a supply of candles and kerosene--just in case. It was often necessary to go around to our power customers and have them shut off their motors so we could bring the voltage Perhaps Mary Fern simply assumed that electrical service in 1914 was as reliable as that which she knew in later years. A more interesting possibility, however, is that, for reasons yet to be discovered, the circuit serving 5900 South was more reliable than others in the company's system.

Other interesting questions arise in connection with the Ereksons' pole line. Nothing is unusual about a farm house being sufficiently far removed from an electrical distribution line as to require a connecting pole line, and it might well have been common practice at that time for the customer to bear the expense of providing the line. But if such was the case, why should the Progress Company have offered a rebate? Was the rebate a "customer incentive" intended to attract business from rural customers? Conversely, if

evidence of how many residents of the area occupied dwellings equipped with electricity. They do, however, suggest the number was not large. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that urban areas were more electrified than the rural districts.

32 Quoted in UP&L Report, Appendix, 289.

31 Mary Fern Erekson, "Father: History of James Theodore Erekson, Native Pioneer of 1864," unpublished biographical sketch (1966),copy at Murray City Parks and Recreation office.

it was an atypical practice to require the customer to provide the pole line, was this an instance of the company's financial dificulties, which will be discussed later?

Henry Joseph Wheeler became a customer of the Progress Company somewhat earlier than his neighbor, James Erekson, did. Interviews with family members suggest that the Wheelers installed electricity in their home about 1910, a date that agrees with physical evidence discovered when the Salt Lake County Parks and Recreation Department restored the house in 1979.33Post-construction modifications indicate that wiring and fixtures were retrofitted into a structure originally designed without the expectation of electricity. This is noteworthy in that Sariah Wheeler, who designed the farm house, included in her plan a fully plumbed pantry and bathroom, the latter equipped with a flush toilet.34The farm house was built in 1898, a time when the possibility of running water and electric power in farm homes seemed equally remote. With her characteristic ability to look beyond present limitations and envision future opportunities, Mrs. Wheeler provided for running water in the design of her new home, but she did not foresee the coming of electricity. Given Sariah's progressive attitudes and the family's financial resources, this omission su6tly indicates just how isolated from the world of electric light and power rural Salt Lake County was at the close of the nineteenth century.

Like the Erekson family, the Wheeler family used electricity initially to illuminate their home and only later extended it to other buildings and applied it to other uses. Anecdotal evidence documents, at least in outline, the farm's evolution from simple house lighting to full electrifi~ation.~~ The first electric appliance of record was Sariah's wringer-washing machine, reputed to be one of the first four in the neighborhood. Exactly when this device made its appearance is uncertain, but it was probably on hand shortly after electricity arrived in 1910; Sariah Wheeler was certainly no technophobe and she did not like to be kept waiting. Electrification of the farm's outbuildings was deferred for several years, until 1919 or 1920, and then completed more or less as a single project. Recollections differ as to who performed the task but they agree that one or more members of the family, not a hired contractor, installed the system.

Incident to farm electrification, the family installed an electric pump in one of the farm's outbuildings as a replacement for the hydraulic ram that

33 A.

34 Biographical Record ofsalt Lake City and Vicinity (Chicago: National Historical Record Co., 1902), 429, copy at USHS.

35 Wallace N. Cooper 2, "The Wheeler Farm Research Restoration Reconstruction," unpublished report prepared for the Salt Lake County Recreation and Parks Department (1977).The report includes information from first-person interviews, with recollections spanning the period from before construction of the house in 1898 to 1969,when Salt Lake County acquired the property.

Glen Humpherys, oral history interview by authors. Dr. Humpherys served as curator-director of Wheeler Historic Farm from 1976 until 2000 and accumulated considerable information about the site, much of it from members of the Wheeler family and their neighbors.

had previously supplied water to the farm house. The ram, which dated from the home's construction in 1898, had been subject to freezing and thus rendered Sariah Wheeler's innovative plumbing system unusable several months each year. It was, therefore, the household technology Mrs. Wheeler had not foreseen (electricity) that eventually came to the rescue of the technology that she had foreseen (indoor plumbing) and made it fully usable.

In spite of mounting competition from Murray City's municipal power company, the growing presence of Utah Power and Light, and disappointing results in the Progress Case litigation, the Progress Company's prospects seemed promising as it approached the 1920s. The company's transmission and distribution lines crisscrossed south Salt Lake County; it was successfully recruiting new customers, both in the urban enclaves of Murray, Midvale, and Magna and in the rural and semi-rural districts that comprised the remainder of the county; it possessed an independent (if modest) generating capacity; it was connected through substations at Midvale and the Salt Lake Pressed Brick Company's yard in Mill Creek with UP&Lk distribution system, the largest electricity supply source in Utah; and it was pressing forward with a proactive program aimed at increasing the company's market share through consumption-based marketing and consumer merchandising.

Appearances, however, often deceive. Behind this reassuring facade, forces were at work sapping the Progress Company's vitality. Rapid but underfunded expansion, the expense of litigating the Progress Case, and escalating competition overtaxed the firm's limited capital resources. The costs of capital improvements and even routine operation expenses were being paid directly from income or personally by John P. Cahoon. The company, of course, employed conventional and approved methods of finance. For example, in January 1915, it pledged real property and water rights to secure $100,000 in mortgage bonds at 6 per~ent.'~This provided the company with a sizable infusion of capital-$40,000 more, in fact, than the bond issue Murray City had recently floated to build its entire municipal power system!-but it was apparently not sizable enough to place the firm on a sound financial footing. At about this time, entries reflecting delinquent taxes and a pattern of short-term borrowing appear in the ledgers of the county re~order.'~Only small amounts were involved (and these were quickly paid), but the appearance of the entries at all suggests that the company's finances were something less than sound.

Little information exists on which to base a detailed analysis of the company's financial distress, but the ascendancy of Utah Power and Light likely acted as an important factor. Upon acquiring Knight Consolidated Power in 1913, UP&L became the Progress Company's principal wholesale

36 The bonds were issued in denominations of $500 (100 bonds), $250 (100 bonds), and $100 (250 bonds), and by January 1920 the debt had been discharged.

37 Salt Lake County Recorder,Abstract ofTitle Book D-ll,92,146,149, and Book D-31,166-67.

Progress Co. line crew somewhere in rural Salt Lake County.

The crew captain is John William Krebs and the vehicle is an International Harvester

Autowagon (registered by the company in 1916).

supplier. In view of its selfdeclared mandate to consolidate the Utah electricity industry, it is doubtful that the new super-company showed much compassion to one of the last important independent private-sector electric firms operating in the Salt Lake Valley. One can only conjecture whether or not UP&L acted with deliberation to speed the Progress Company's demise or waited patiently for a hostile market to deliver the inevitable coup de grdce. What is certain, however, is that on April 30, 1921, the Progress Company transferred title to all its properties outside Murray City, with the exception of some real estate and associated water rights, to UP&L's acolyte, the Utah Power Company (of Maine). Shortly thereafter, title was passed on to Utah Power and Light itself.38

This transaction reduced the company's properties to those inside the corporate limits of Murray City. There was little point in continuing such a truncated system, and so, for a second time, the Progress Company was offered to Murray City. Chester Cahoon opened negotiations on June 24, 1924, and in the following months the two parties agreed to a purchase price of $32,500. The mayor and city commissioners approved the bill of sale by resolution on December 11, 1924, at which time the Progress Company ceased to exist as an active corporation.Voting in favor of the resolution was Commissioner Gottlieb Berger, the man who, twelve years before, had voted to establish Murray City's municipal power company.39

By law, a corporation that had ceased to legally exist could continue operations to wind up its business affairs." The Progress Company persisted in this post mortem existence until at least the spring of 1931, when it transferred title to a parcel of land and attendant water rights to Salt Lake City. Ironically, these same water rights had been confirmed to the company as a

38 UP&L Report, Appendix, 292.

39 Murray City Commission, Minute Book G:June 18,1924,169;July 16,1924,199;July 28,1924,204 (Resolution No. 137);July 31, 1924,207 (Resolution No. 141); December 11,1924,354 (Resolution No. 218).

40 Compiled Laws of the State $Utah, 1907, Title 14, Chapter 1, $323 (1908),as amended.

result of the Progress Case and were, perhaps, the only tangible benefit it had derived from that costly litigati~n.~'

In retrospect, it would seem that the Progress Company impressed itself but lightly on the history of Salt Lake County. It is little remembered today, even among historians who have made the electricity industry their special study.42What, then, did this all-but-forgotten enterprise achieve in its almost three decades of corporate life? It remained an active concern with an independent corporate identity for a period of twenty-seven years, at a time (1897-1924) when the average life of an electricity company in the valley lasted less than three years. It also extended electrical service to residential and small business customers (including farms and rural households) not. otherwise served by industrial and transportation-oriented companies, and it pioneered the consumer marketing of home electrical appliances. The company benefited very little from this effort, but its initiative stimulated demand and cultivated a market later exploited by Utah Power and Light and others. The Progress Company also influenced the decision of Murray City officials to acquire a municipal power system for their community. Rightly or wrongly, the proponents of municipal power cited the company as an example of all that was amiss with the private ownership of utilities. The motives and even the veracity of the company were questioned and the quality of its service denigrated-and, as Chester P. admitted, the service provided by the Progress Company left much to be desired. Desirable electrical service was not at that time as important as was available electrical service, however. Murray residents, like many others in south Salt Lake County, learned to appreciate the advantages of home and small business electrification (imperfect though it may have been) courtesy of the Progress Company. If it is true that the company failed to meet the expectations of its customers, it is equally true that it played an important part in creating those expectations in the first place. Lastly, the Progress Company initiated litigation that led to the codification of water allocations along Big Cottonwood Creek and "confirmed and quieted" the title of Salt Lake City to water claimed by the city under a series of exchange agreements between itself and prior claimants.

Obviously, not all of these were things the Progress Company wished to accomplish, and in some cases the company's accomplishments ill-served its own best interests. But, intended or not, beneficial or not, its accomplishments were real and have left their impress on the history of Salt Lake County.

41 Utah Third District Court: Case file, Progress Co. and Rudokh Knudsen v. Salt Lake City et al., unreported decision, Utah State Archives and Records Service (Series 1622, No. 8921).

42 Of the four scholarly works that treat the early history of electricity in Salt Lake County (Dastrup, "Electrification of Utah"; Haycock, "Electric Power Comes to Utah"; and McCormick, "The Beginning of Modern Electric Power Service" and The Power to Make Good Things Happen), only Haycock mentions the Progress Co. by name, and only in a footnote listing small companies that served isolated communities after 1921.

The Fight at Soldier Crossing, 1884: Military Considerations in Canyon Country

By ROBERT S. MCPHERSON and WINSTON B. HURST

In the summer of 1881, the Utes in southeastern Utah were rejoicing over recent events that had culminated in their victory at the battle of Pinhook Draw.' Under the sod of southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado lay twelve cowboys whose deaths sent a sharp message to local cattle outfits that their use of Ute lands would come at a price in blood. The whites had received stinging lessons on the problems of pursuing Indians in their own territory, the danger of riding into a well-laid ambush, the importance of clearly developed tactical and logistical plans, and the difficulty of pursuing a victorious foe who melted into the landscape or claimed ignorance of events. Yet time would show that it was the Utes who proved most adept at applying lessons from the past.

Three years later, at Soldier Crossing, history would repeat itself. This clash between the Utes and military brought into sharp focus the problem of conducting military operations in the canyon country of southeastern Utah, showing how a decidedly smaller force can turn overwhelming odds to its favor. While the loss of life in this particular brushfire war was small and the fray not terribly significant, it provides an opportunity to understand why the conflict between the Utes and whites of the region dragged on in intermittent spurts for another forty years, not ending until 1923.

But in 1881 this incessant hostility lay in the future, with no hint as to its final outcome. The Utes were celebrating their victory at Pinhook Draw and using it to make clear their message of resistance to white expansion. Mancos Jim, one of the prominent Ute participants in the fight, openly boasted about it to the Mormon settlers in Bluff. Albert R. Lyman, a local historian, writes how the Utes "looked with ugly disfavor" at any efforts by the whites to use the grasslands of the San Juan area for grazing. Any animal found doing so was fair game for theft, mutilation, or appropriation as a quick meal. The Dolores News reported "Indians kill[ing] hundreds of cattle belonging to the stockmen of this vicinity, permitting them to lie

' See Rusty Salmon and Robert S. McPherson, "Cowboys, Indians, and Conflict: The Pinhook Draw Fight, 1881," Utah Historical Quarterly 69 (2001):4-28.

Robert S. McPherson teaches history at the College of Eastern Utah-San Juan Campus and is on the editorial advisory board of Utah Historical Quarterly. Winston B. Hurst is an archaeologist and history buff who lives and works in Blanding and is a native of southeastern Utah. Terrain photos and graphics were done by Winston Hurst.

where they fell, not making any use of them."2 Lyman tells of a group of stockmen inspecting possible rangelands near Elk Ridge who "met a band of Utes headed by Mancos Jim, who registered his sullen objection to any white man entering this last splendid hunting ground where the Ute reigned supreme.") Mancos Jim was quoted as saying, "Me no go; my father die here, my father's father die here, me die here

At this time, the twelve or so small cattle outfits in the area were also feeling the pressure of change as larger outfits began eyeing the Four Corners region. One of the most prominent was the Kansas and New Mexico Land and Cattle Company. Backed by British and Scottish investors and operated by broth- Mancos Jim. ers Harold and Edmund Carlisle from England, this company entered southeastern Utah in 1883. By 1896 the Carlisle outfit would become the largest of a number of cattle operations competing for grass in southeastern Utah.5

In the meantime, the newspapers were advertising that "rich specimens of gold and silver ore" had been discovered on the northern part of the Ute reservation and that "as soon as the season is open there will be a rush of miners and prospectors to the new fields." "The section now occupied by [the Southern Utes] may be opened up to settlement by the busy, pushing white population which is flocking to us and spreading all over the So~thwest."~Between the cowboys and the miners, the Utes had their hands full protecting their lands.

The first fracas of importance in events leading to the Soldier Crossing fight occurred along the San Juan River near what is today called Aneth. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, eighteen families from Colorado had crossed over the state line into Utah and settled along the banks of the river to pursue farming and trade. Among these settlers was Henry L. Mitchell, a firebrand of contention among Anglos, Navajos, and Utes alike. His story has been told elsewhere. Peter Tracy, who lived one mile below

* Dolores News, October 29, 1881.

Albert R. Lyman, "History of San Juan County, 1879-1917," 35, Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, BrighamYoung University, Provo, Utah (Lee Library).

Quoted in Beatrice P. Nielson, "Settling of San Juan County," 11, Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

Don D.Walker, "The Carlisles: Cattle Barons of the Upper Basin," Utah Histovical Quarterly 32 (1964): 269-70,272.

Dolores News, March 4 and 11,1882.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Mitchell's ranch, displayed a similar temperament-violent and quick to offend.'

On the evening of August 28, 1883, a group of Utes visited Tracy's homestead, found that he was not around, and helped themselves to corn and melons. The next night a band of seventy Utes returned, and Tracy demanded pay. A fight ensued and, according to some accounts, a Ute named The Sore Leg shot Tracy through the neck, killing him instantly. As a member of Narraguinip's band, The Sore Leg and others in the group had most likely been involved in the Pinhook fight and were not averse to shedding white blood.The Indians fled to the mouth of the Mancos River, where they threatened to kill or drive away all of the inhabitants living along the lower San Juan. Five days later, a detachment of twenty-four soldiers under Lieutenant Guilfoyle from Fort Lewis arrived and found everything tranquil, the Utes apparently not wanting a confrontation.*

The fall and winter passed quietly as the Indians moved to their winter camps, but the spring of 1884 saw renewed activity. On April 15 at Mitchell's store, flaring tempers on both sides resulted in the kifing of one Navajo and the wounding of two others. A group of Utes who had pitched camp nearby took advantage of the incident to ride four miles upriver to another trading post and tell two hired hands that a fight had broken out. The men fled the post, providing a wonderfiul opportunity for the Indians to appropriate an estimated $2,400 worth of s~pplies.~When Lieutenant J. E Kreps arrived five days later, he found trading posts along the San Juan buttoned up and prepared for war. Edgar Owen Noland's post, eighteen miles above Mitchell's, had its doors and windows closed in preparation for a Ute attack.Three hours before the lieutenant's arrival Indians had ordered the trader to leave. Noland's wife departed for Mancos with an escort while Edgar prepared for the worst. At Mitchell's, where twenty-three cowboys defended the premises, the owner spoke of how both Utes and Navajos had fired at the white men, though little physical evidence indicated a skirmish. The lieutenant left a couple of soldiers to observe further developments and returned to Noland's, where the trader reported that Utes had fired at his establishment. Kreps came away believing that the area's Indians wanted to "kill the white gentile [non-Mormon] settlers" and that the Utes wanted plunder, while the Navajos wanted both plunder and revenge for the

' See Robert S. McPherson, "Navajos, Mormons, and Henry L. Mitchell: Cauldron of Conflict on the San Juan," Utah Historical Quarterly 55 (Winter 1987):50-65.

Tolonel Stanley to Warren Patten,August 31, September 1 and 2,1883, Record Group 75, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Consolidated Ute Agency, Federal Records Center, Denver, Colorado Fereafter cited as Consol. Ute Agency]. Further investigation of this incident indicates that blame for the murder was later placed on a Navajo. Who actually killed Tracy is in question. See David M. Brugge's unpublished manuscript entitled "Navajo Use and Occupation of Lands North of the San Juan River in Present-day Utah," in author's possession.

Major R. H. Hall to Assistant Adjutant General at Fort Leavenworth,April 18, 1884, Record Group 75, Letters Received, 1881-1907, Bureau of Indian Mairs, National Archives, Washington, D.C. bereafter cited as Letters Received-BIA]

previous shootings.'O Perhaps the most interesting fact coming from the lieutenant's report was the number of cowboys in the region instantly willing to throw in for a scuffle against their common foe.

Other reports of discontent filtered in. Two cattlemen told of how Navajos and Utes had killed no less than one hundred cows that spring, "actuated by pure deviltry, as the carcasses are usually untouched, save to cut out the tongue." The newspaper rendering this report by "Messrs. Adams and Ptolemy" continued:

They saw two or three Indians of Narraguinip's band who were shot by the Rico boys in the fight at La Sal. One of them, an old buck, is minus two or three inches of one of his legs, which shortened as it healed. They have very little use for Rico [a mining camp in southwestern Colorado that provided a substantial number of men for the Pinhook fight]. Oscar Carter, of the West Dolores, told them he came from Rico, and every one of his Indian visitors left the camp instantly.The Narraguinip band is composed of renegades from the Uncompahgre, Paiutes, Navajos, and other tribes and are not recognized at any agency."

Warren Patten, the Southern Ute agent, had the responsibility of keeping track of this group and took the jabs of discontent when things went wrong. He must have just shrugged his shoulders when E. L. Stevens, acting commissioner of Indian Affairs, directed him to "take the necessary steps to have your Indians return to their reservation at once and remain there."12 Within three weeks of this directive, these Indians were embroiled in the Soldier Crossing incident.

Sources on the Soldier Crossing conflict are fairly abundant and include accounts from Harold Carlisle, the military, and the Doloves News. But the most complete rendering of events was made by a Colorado cowboy named Sam Todd." (See page 194 for a photo of Todd.) He wrote about this fight in 1925, roughly forty years after the dust had settled. Most reminiscences written after such a lengthy intervening time span are questionable in terms of accuracy.This is not the case with Todd's. Its corre-spondence with contemporary reports, estimates of mileage, and internal details make his letter not only highly believable but also important in understanding the conduct of military operations in canyon country. This article depends heavily on this never-before-used source.

The affair started simply enough. On July 3, 1884, a substantial group of 'O Second Lieut. J. E Kreps to Post Adjutant at Fort Lewis, May 1,1884, Letters Received-BIA. " Dolores News,June 28, 1884.

l2 E. L. Stevens to Warren Patten, Esq., June 13, 1884, Consol. Ute Agency.

l3 Sam Todd to Glen Hanks, "A Pioneer Experience," March 2, 1925, 1-5, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah (USHS). Sam Todd is an interesting character. Born in Missouri in 1854, he soon moved to Texas and worked there as a cowboy. By age eighteen he contracted tuberculosis; after a two-year bout with the disease he had a lung removed.Thereafier, he always wore a pad under his coat to compensate for the caved-in left side of his chest. In 1880, at the age of twenty-five, he moved to the Disappointment country of southwestern Colorado, where he continued to ranch. He lived in this area until 1925, when he and his wife moved to Burbank, California, for the last four years of his life; however, he returned to Cortez, Colorado, in 1929 long enough to breathe his last and be buried in the country that he knew and loved. See article about him in the Montexuma VaEleyJournal,April22,1987.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

cowboys had assembled in an early summer roundup at the foot of Blue Mountain. Three combined outfits belonging to William "Billy" H. Wilson, Charles "Race Horse" Johnson, and the Carlisles were camped on the South Fork of Montezuma Creek (known today as Verdure Creek)." Johnson and Wilson, a one-armed Texan who had lost his appendage in a fight with Comanches, owned ranches in the Dolores area and grazed their herds on Blue Mountain.15The Carlisles had their headquarters about ten miles north of present-day Monticello.

A group of Utes, some of whom had off-reservation passes signed by Agent Patten, were in the area to hunt. They were camped below the cowboys, and surprisingly enough, given past events, were invited to visit and eat with their white neighbors. During the interchange, the cowboys noticed the Indians had three horses belonging to Johnson and another to a cowboy named Joshua "Spud" Hudson, whose involvement in the Pinhook incident was well known. Four men went to the Indian camp to reclaim the livestock but met with resistance. As the cowboys attempted to cut out the horses from the Indian herd, a Ute named ~iookdrove the horses back. Cowboy Hank Sharp attempted to get a rope on one of the horses, but according to white accounts, Brook drew his knife and stabbed two or three times at his antagonist, giving Sharp a slice on the neck. Whether this was more an attempt to cut the rope than to kill the cowboy no one will ever know, but there was enough provocation in the cowboy's mind to shoot the Ute in the mouth, with the bullet passing through his neck.16Brook lived, but he was not the only person to be wounded that day.

The Utes took up positions near their camp and started firing while the women and children fled. The four cowboys retreated to their camp, sounded the alarm, and joined the others in gathering horses in the corral, hitching four large mules to a wagon to haul gear, and preparing to beat a hasty retreat. By this time, the Indians had surrounded the cowboys and were firing at the hustling men. Joseph H. Nielson, a Mormon from Bluff who was working in the camp at the time, grabbed Billy Wilson's two sons, ages eight and ten, and headed for a nearby gully.There they lay until the fighting ended. "Only a heavy hand on the neck of each curious lad kept his head from popping up each time a shot was fired.'"'These boys later

l4 James Monroe Redd clarifies exactly where the two groups were located: "The cowboys were camped on the top of the hill just aboveverdure where the dugway goes up. It's a pretty good road now. It used to be a narrow dirt road. The Utes were camped down inverdure where the Barton home is now"; James Monroe Redd, Jr., interview with Michael Hurst, February 15, 1973, p. 9, CRC-J4, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, BrighamYoung University, Provo, Utah.

j5 Don D. Walker, "Cowboys, Indians, and Cavalry," Utah Historical Quarterly 34 (Summer 1966): 254-62,This article is an annotated letter written by Harold Carlisle eleven days after the fight and published in the Denver Republican on July 29. Rich in detail and contemporary when written, it is an important primary document.

l6 Walker, "Cowboys, Indians, and Cavalry," 257; Cornelia Adams Perkins, Marian Gardner Nielson, and Lenora Butt Jones, Saga of Sun Juan (Salt Lake City: Mercury Publishing Company, 1968), 242; H. L. Mitchell to Warren Patten, July 8,1884, Consol. Ute Agency.

" Perkins et al., Saga, 242.

made a twenty-nine-hour ride, without food or rest, back to Durango with the cowboys. Nielson took a separate route at night, fleeing down Montezuma Canyon to the San Juan River and back to Bluff, fearing that his involvement might antagonize the Utes against the settlers there.18

In the meantime, the cowboys heading to Colorado started up the hill from Verdure on what was then called the Bluff Road. Apparently, they abandoned two wagons and some equipment at their camp, while the third wagon only reached a place known as the "Salt Lick" (later named the Roundup Ground), two or three miles southwest ofverdure, before it too was 1ost.There the Utes, hiding in the clumps of oak brush that dotted the surrounding landscape, allowed the slow-moving vehicle, surrounded by the cowboys and many of their horses, to get within range. They then opened fire.The four mules were killed, and two men, a cook named Cook and Adolf Lusk, who had charge of the horses, were wounded in the foot and thigh respectively.

The situation was desperate. With only seven rifles and the rest sixshooters, "most of them out of cartridges, having shot them away at deer for fun," the cowboys were in no position to resist.19The Utes, on the other hand, "wore new shirts and had new Winchesters and revolvers, bought in Durango with the money paid them as an annuity at Ignacio [Southern Ute Agency] by Agent Patten."20It was time for the white men to withdraw, leaving behind the wagon and the horses, a herd estimated at between 100 and 150. More than one cowboy lost the only horse he had and was obliged to ride double. The men made their way to the towns of southwestern Colorado, much exhausted and chagrined that they had once again been bested. The Utes picked through their booty, gathered their newly acquired horse herd, and began a leisurely move to the rough country west of Blue Mountain, a proven refuge during times of conflict. They left behind the remains of the burned wagon, "the old iron from which was scattered in the Roundup Ground for years after."21

Word spread quickly and generated varying reactions. The Mormons in Bluff were concerned about the possibility of escalating violence. Platte D. Lyman wrote in his diary, "During the past week a difficulty occurred between cowmen and Indians on the South Montezuma during which 2 Indians were killed and 2 white men wounded. This may yet lead to considerable trouble."22To the people of Colorado, this incident was one more example of Indian depredation and consequent threats to their financial investments.Their estimated 17,000 cattle were part of a two-million-dollar investment in the livestock industry, which was now "at the mercy of the

'' Dolores News,July 12,1884; Lyman, "History of San Juan," 40.

l9 Lyman, "History of San Juan," 41;Todd,"APioneer Experience," 1; Dolores News, July 12,1884.

'O Dolores News, July 12, 1884.

*I Albert R. Lyman, The Outlaw of Navaho Mountain (Salt Lake City: Albert R. Lyman Trust, 1986), 55-56.

** Platte D. Lyman, "Diary of Platte D. Lyman," 76, Lee Library.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Indian~."~~Circumstances were ripe for another showdown. This time, however, the military took charge.

Capt. Henry I? Perrine with F Troop, Sixth Cavalry, left Fort Lewis with forty-nine men on July 6, the day after receiving the news. On the way, he stopped at Dolores and asked for volunteers to help get the horses back. According to the newspapers, "eighty cowboys armed to the teeth and swearing vengeance against the Utes" departed for the battle. Military accounts are more modest and say that forty-five joined the military expedition. Sam Todd agrees more with the newspapers, estimating ninety. At least part of the cowboy force rendezvoused with the main body at Cross Canyon and selected Rube Lockett from Dolores as leader.24

On July 7, Second Lieut. B. K.West left Fort Lewis with a detachment of thirty-five men of B Troop, Sixth Cavalry, to assist Captain Perrine. Perrine's troops reached the scene of the earlier fight on July 10, with West joining them three days later, bringing the total number of members of the retaliating force to no less than 130, with the possibility of as many as 175.25 The Utes were probably at not even half that strength, and many of their number were non-combatants. A contemporary estimates their "force from 75 to 100 strong under Narraguinip and Marian~."~~Being encumbered with women, children, and all their belongings, the Indians seemed to be at a distinct military disadvantage.

On the other hand, Perrine created a logistical problem with such a large force. Not only did he have to bring supplies for his own men but, according to Todd, he also told the civilian volunteers not to bring any supplies because his sixteen pack mules would carry plenty for everyone.We no one knew how long this expedition would take, the two weeks that it did require strained the supply resources for such a large group. Water, an even more precious commodity in this high desert environment, proved most critical.

The same day that Perrine's force arrived at the site of the skirmish, Sergeant Christian Sof&e and eleven soldiers from B Company, 22d Infantry, on an unrelated mission to Mitchell's post, arrested five Utes who had been involved in the Verdure fight. He took their arms and horses, placing them in his custody because "several settlers on this river threaten to kill them on sight," and he felt he could protect them until they returned to the Southern Ute Reservation." Two days later, Red Jacket threatened an attack if the sergeant dld not release the prisoners to his custody, promising to bring them to Agent Patten. Red Jacket, Topine, Johnny Benow, and Narraguinip, who was supposedly leading the main group, were among those demanding the prisoners' freedom. AU four of these men were noto-

23 Dolores News)July 12,1884.

24 Ibid.;Walker, "Cowboys, Indians, and Cavalry," 257; Dolores News, July 26,1884.

25 Walker, "Cowboys, Indians, and Cavalry," 257; Report of Col. L. P Bradley to Secretary of War, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 2d Session, 4gth Congress, vol. 1,1884, p. 121.

26 Dolores News, July 26,1884.

*' Sgt. Christian Soae to Warren Patten, July 12,1884, Consol. Ute Agency.

rious for their parts in previous conflicts.

FIGURE I. Routes of Utes and Once the sergeant learned that Captain so/diersthroughbeforeandafier Perrine's force was headed in another direc- Soldier Crossing fight, tion and there was no hope of assistance, he freed his prisoners.28

Agent Patten, in the meantime, had sent Chief Ignacio and other Southern Ute leaders to the western end of the reservation to ascertain if any of their people were involved in these conflicts or if it was just the band of renegades living around Blue Mountain whom the whites called "Paiutes."The agent wrote with satisfaction that he was convinced that his own charges were innocent, and as far as the Southern Utes were concerned, if these "Paiutes.. .all got killed, it will be a good thing."29Patten's desire to exonerate "his" Indians reflects more his desire to remain clean of accusation than total reality. No doubt many Southern Utes claimed no affiliation with the fleeing Indians, but there is also no doubt that others had strong links to Paiute ancestry and were members of the Utah group. Still, many Southern Utes professed innocence. Perhaps part of their denial sprang from an Interior Department letter supposedly received by a man in Durango named George W. Kephart "authorizing settlers to shoot any Indian seen attempting to join the renegades from the reser~ation.'"~

28 Letter, no name, to Warren Patten, Consol. Ute Agency, n.d., 1884.

29 Warren Patten to H. Price, commissioner of Indian Affairs, July (blurred) 1884, Consol. Ute Agency. 30D010~esNews, July 19,1884.

When Captain Perrine arrived at the scene Probable route of pursuit from of the fight, he found nine dead horses, eight the pushout lookina south. 1. The others wounded beyond use, and Billy Pushoutrim.2~So~ierroute, Wilson's dead mules. The trail of the Utes descends the hogback was easy to follow because it skirted around the southern edge of Blue Mountain. Bloody ridge crest to the traversbark poultices used to dress wounds were left es thelowerno*hslopeofthe I at various campsites. Harold Carlisle, who ridge, then breaks out southwestapparently was not accompanying the mili- onto the Cheesebox Canyon tary but was intimately connected to the benchm3.Charrediuniperstumps -. events, described what the soldiers found: next to trail, possib,y the trees"The band had traveled slowly, making about burned by the Ute rear guard. ten miles a day, camping in more than one place for tw~da~s,~la~in~ cards, barking trees, and even making race tracks on the heads of Cottonwood and Indian Creeks, to test the metal (sic) of the stolen stock, and tendmg their wounded, as was shown by the rags littered about in their camping places."" Finally, the sheer number of horses, stolen or otherwise, as well as the goats the Utes herded along as a mobile source of food, left an indelible trail easily followed.

Today this path is not as readily discerned. According to Albert R. Lyman, it was called the "Big Trail" or "Old Trail" and was a well-known thoroughfare that led westward into a maze of canyons, slickrock, and widely separated sources of water and campsites." Based on Todd's description of where the Utes went, a best-guess mapping of the trail would start in Verdure, cross upper Recapture Wash and Johnson Creek, then proceed to the Round Mountain-Mormon Pasture area on the divide between the San Juan River and Indian Creek drainages via a trail across what is now Bayles Ranch. From the Round Mountain area they traveled south along Elk Ridge through the Big and Little Notches to the Bear's Ears area on south Elk Ridge. At the springs or ponds near the northern end of the Bear's Ears, the Utes rested.They then moved northwest about ten miles to the vicinity of a small land formation now called the Pushout, thence off Elk Ridge to the north bench of Cheesebox Canyon and on to White

31 Walker, "Cowboys, Indians, and Cavalry," 258.

It is unclear whether the trail is a literary device invented by Lyman, a metaphor similar to the "warpath" of Hollywood movies, or an actual physical trail imbued by the Utes with legend and lore from previous defensive and offensive campaigns, as Lyman asserts. In any case, the Utes were undoubtedly following known and familiar trails, components of a vast and complex network of ancient trails that spanned the region.

Canyon, where the fight occurred. Once the military expedition left the springs at the base of the Bear's Ears and the aspens and ponderosa pines of Elk Ridge for the pinyon and juniper canyon country below, it would be terra incognita to the soldiers. Todd states that if the trail did not pass by water, the men planned to look for birds to find it, a risky proposition at best.

As the pursuers sat astride their horses on the western rim of Elk Ridge, they spied two pillars of smoke about a half mile below and two Indians riding their ponies down the steep slope to the valley. Sam Todd believed these were signal fires to warn the main group. Harold Carlisle goes even further, suggesting that these two Indians were actually Southern Utes sent by Agent Patten to bring in any of his charges involved in the incident. Now they were serving as a rear guard and had ridden seventy-five miles at a rapid pace to warn the renegades. Patten and Ignacio, however, denied any knowledge that these two men were working in their employ. While Carlisle's thought appears to be mere conjecture, it does portray feelings of distrust toward the Indian Service in general and Agent Patten in particular.

A large cloud of dust ten miles away revealed the Indians' encampment, and through binoculars the military could see them preparing to move.The steep, rough, mile-long descent off Elk Ridge took much longer than the cowboys and cavalry had anticipated.') By the time they reached the Indians' camp, their prey was long gone, as was the water they hoped to find. The Utes had availed themselves of rainwater trapped in a sandstone basin and then before departing had watered all of their stock. Todd explains, "From the tracks the goat herd had been watered last, and they had taken it all. (The goats they always took with them on the war trail, as they could out-travel a horse and could be eaten when the Utes were too busy to hunt.)")'

The lack of water proved crucial. It was one o'clock on a hot July 14 afternoon, and temperatures in that country could easily rise to well over one hundred degrees. The soldiers had filled their canteens that morning but were now out of water. The cowboys had even less, and according to Todd they also complained less, although the soldiers did not share what they had. The horses suffered from lack of water even more, being

33 Identieing parts of this old Ute trail is difficult. In an attempt to tie Todd's account to the land, the authors spent two days looking for a likely trail off Elk Ridge. The most plausible route followed by the Utes and their pursuers in 1884 is now marked by a major, developed stock trail that heads in a corral on the rim of the Pushout and descends via a knife-like ridge with several level spots to the valley floor.This trail has been significantly improved and maintained over the years and remains in active use as a drive trail. Most other sections of the Pushout and adjoining lands that offer the view described by Todd are impassable or would be difficult to negotiate with packstock, as ledges, talus, dense vegetation, and rock walls would make movement very inconvenient or impossible.Todd's statement that two Utes a half mile away from the rim lit signal fires to warn the main body fits very nicely with the fact that a level bench is located approximately a half mile from the top of the ridge.The place is clearly visible from the likely Ute encampment on the Cheesebox/White Canyon bench to the southwest, and it offers an easy trail down to the valley floor for those who would have lit the fires. Two charred stumps next to the trail may be the trees mentioned in Todd's account.

34 Todd, "A Pioneer Experience," 2.

described as "wet with sweat after the first ten miles."35Although the heavy, six-foot-tall Todd had brought a second mount and changed horses every five miles, the rough canyon country took its toll on the animals. To compound the problem, there was 'no breeze to disperse the dust. As the gap between pursuer and pursued closed, the soldiers and cowboys rode in suspended dust clouds "like ashes" left by the fleeing Indians. The chase wore on. The Utes separated into three bands. Closest to the advancing white men was a group of six or seven men serving as a rear guard to fight a delaying action; two miles ahead rode the main body Location of unfired .50-70 caliber of armed men, and another four miles ahead round cached along trail approaching Piute Pass (see note 40). Inset shows bullet as

of them were some men and the women and children driving livestock and hauling equipmen^'^ Occasionally, a tired Indian pony stood in the trail, so played out that it would found under overhanging not step aside until whipped with a quirt. The boulder, illuminated by late sight encouraged the pursuers. Captain afternoon sun. Perrine felt his prey was in his hand and at any moment he would close with the enemy. He followed relentlessly. Todd reports, "We thought we could surely catch them before sundown and kept at a hard gallop.. .. TThile we couldn't see them, we thought we were right at them and would catch them in a few minutes. So it kept up all that aftern~on.")~One account tells of how an occasional shot or two from the Utes' trail element served to slow the soldiers' progress.)*

Even with the passing of sundown, the pursuit continued. Not until total darkness made tracking over slickrock impossible did the exhausted pursuers get a rest. In the words of Sam Todd, "We tumbled off, layed [sic] down with the bridle reins in our hands, and lay there until the moon came up. [We then] took the trail again, a tired, thirsty, hungry outfit, [with] our horses suffering for water more than we were.""

The pursuers followed the Utes across the inner gulch ofWhite Canyon at the location identified on modern maps as "Soldier Crossing." ~rom there, the chase turned northwest, following the southwest bench ofWhite Canyon along what Carlisle identified as the trail leading from Bluff City

35 Ibid.

36 Walker, "Cowboys, Indians, and Cavalry,"258.

37 Todd, "A Pioneer Experience," 2.

38 Lyman, The Outlaw ofNavaho Mountain, 59.

39 Todd,"A Pioneer Experience," 2.

to the Colorado River, today's Utah State Route 95.That road passes along the bench between the inner gorge ofWhite Canyon on the right and the massive, 1,500-foot-high, cliff-capped escarpment of Wingate Mesa on the lefi. Daylight found the pursuers between these geographical features, hot after the fleeing Indians.

The trail soon lefi the White Canyon bench and climbed westward to the high, narrow mesa dividing White Canyon fiom Red Canyon. There the Utes positioned themselves for an ambush at what has since been called "Piute Pass," a narrow declivity through the caprock overlooking a steep, exposed talus slope.Todd describes the situation:

When full daylight came we were at the foot of this wall and the trail led to a narrow break in it, barely wide enough for one horse to go into. We halted, of course, to investigate.We knew we were close to them because for the last three miles we had found a number of give-out horses wet with sweat, and some of the last ones were still panting. And while we were talking, we heard a goat bleat just on top, and it was plain to us boys that we were in a trap. The Captain, however, said No, there was no trap and we must climb that mesa, but considering the necessity for water, we would halt and send a detail to hunt for a rain water tank.40

The halted command was now unsure what action to take. Joe Wormington, a civilian packer and scout for the military, volunteered to climb to the gap and see if he could determine the Indians' location. A young cowboy named James "Rowdy" Higgins anxiously joined him. He had lost his mother and father to Indian warfare as a child and often expressed his eagerness for revenge. Although members of the party warned of the possibility of a trap, every indication being that the Utes were waiting on top, the two men disregarded the cautions and started up the hill." When they approached to within seventy-five feet of the gap, the

40 Ibid. People who travel to the battle site will find the terrain formidable. The trail to Piute Pass is dimly etched in the land and is not associated with the recently re-bladed, rnid-twentieth-century uranium road that traverses another part of the slope at a gentler angle. After leaving the bench along which Highway 95 runs, the Utes' trail winds over a ridge with three step-like hills that ascend to the base of a steep talus slope approximately three hundred meters long. Ascending at a more than thirty-degree angle, the slope is covered with boulders, sagebrush, and pinyon and juniper trees.At the top of the talus slope is the low saddle in the seventy-foot-high rimrock through which Piute Pass slices.There is no level place at the top of the talus slope for the maneuver of units, and the trail traversing the talus is too steep for maneuvers. The aforementioned bladed road has cut through the pass and widened the gap, apparently obliterating the actual narrow defile where the old trail passed and significantly disturbing the site of the Utes' position.

There are two interesting points for conjecture: First, two unfired .50-70 caliber bullets have been found along the trail, one between the White Canyon bench and the upper talus slope, the other in a protected location in the Ute position at the top of the trd. These were made to be fired either by a U.S. Army Springfield rifle (obsolete but probably still in use in 1884) or by a Sharps rifle. The placement of the bullets suggests the possibility that they may have been put in position as defensive "medicine" to invoke supernatural power in defense against the pursuers. A second issue is how the Utes brought all of their livestock up such a steep slope and through the narrow defile. Most likely, they separated and tied into strings the large horse herd before leading them up the trail in groups. The ruggedness of the terrain would preclude herding so many animals en masse.

41 See Frank Silvey, "History and Settlement of Northern San Juan County," 44-45, Lee Library; Walker, "Cowboys, Indians, and Cavalry, 258; Lyman, Indians and Outlaws, 68; and Dolores News, August 2, 1884.

Utes opened fire. Higgins fell wounded but General view of ~iutePass battle had enough strength to crawl to the protec- site looking south. 1, Ute position tion of a large boulder. Wormington, also atpass~2,ProbableU~S~position wounded, picked himself up and tried runin talus slope and grassy bench ning straight down the slope. Struck by a second volley, he tumbled head over heels before 3. location Of coming to rest with his head and shoulders Wormington and Higgins bodies down slope and his feet and legs against a

4. Location of cached .50-70 callarge rock. Those below could not see his iber unfired rounds (see note 40).face, but as he lay unmoving they could hear

5. Modern bladed road. 6, him moan and say something ina~dible.'~ route from the Pushout via the Pandemonium struck the soldiers below.

The Utes' attention now focused on a CheeseboWhite Canyon bench. swirling tangle of men and horses. They fired Do"ed lines indicate inferred round afier round, tearing up the ground but routes. hitting only Todd7s horse. Bunched together in the confusion, the mass of men should have made an easy target. In retrospect,Todd found it difficult to explain how so many shots could miss so many people, unless the Indians were just shooting at the clump of men without picking out specific targets. Some of the cowboys and soldiers were in such a panic that they fled without their horses, "the crowd tearing down the hill to a bunch of cedars for shelter." They left seven saddled horses behind, a dangerous act, given their situation. Others, more determined, took the time to lead their horses over the rough, rocky terrain to protective cover. Once under cover, the cowboys and cavalry safeguarded the extra horses, the pack train, and the soldiers' mounts in the rear while maintaining fire on the gap and its surrounding area. The Indians still had the upper hand. Lying flat on the rocks above, they were invisible to those below. The steadiness of aim that they lacked at the beginning of the fight was now replaced with accurate range estimation and an ability to " [shoot] close at whatever they could see, so that a hat held up on a stick was sure to get a hole in it.7743

42 Walker, "Cowboys, Indians, and Cavalry," 258;Todd, "A Pioneer Experience," 2.

43 Todd, "A Pioneer Experience," 3. While the battlefield has been picked over by visitors to the site, the evidence found on the site (now in private hands) gives an indication of how both sides were armed. The

Captain Perrine faced three major prob- ~1~~~~2Baftlesiteand lems. The first was the two wounded men on ~~rr~~~~ing area. the slope. According to a later newspaper account, he tried without success to find volunteers who would follow him up the exposed slope to retrieve the ~ounded.~~Aroundnine o'clock that morning, with the sun baking the landscape, Wormington stopped his groaning and breathed his last. The soldiers turned their binoculars on Higgins, who lay gasping for air. His pale face and labored breathing were the only signs of life, and by noon he was dead, too. As the men lay dying, Mancos Jim took advantage of the situation to amuse his people and taunt the soldiers below. He would jump up on the rock face, dance around and holler, "Oh my God, boys, come and help me" or "Oh my God, boys, a drink of water," mimiclung the cries of the wounded that the Indians could hear so clearly because of their close proximity." No doubt these antics were met with a shower of lead but without effect. A short while later, Mancos Jim repeated his performance-Thus the day wore on.

Captain Perrine's second problem was water. Afier his men had spent a day and a half of heavy exertion and fear in blistering heat, the situation

soldiers carried .45-70 caliber trapdoor Spring6eld carbines with a ma%imumeffective range of 500 yards. The cowboys had .44-40 Winchester center-fire rifles with a maximum effective range of 200 yards. The standing operating procedure for soldiers at this time was for each man to carry sixty rounds on his person and sixty rounds in his saddlebag.

The Utes had a greater variety of rifles, including at least a .45-60 caliber Winchester, a .44-40 Winchester, a Henry rifle, and a Sharps.This analysis is based on the ten pounds of lead and the shell casings found at the site. Obviously, there also would have been other types of firearms involved in the fracas.

44 Dolores News, August 2, 1884.

45 Ibid.

had turned desperate. No one in the party Wew east to Elk Ridge from the knew the country well enough to locate any Ute9sposjtionatpiute Pass. 1. of the several small springs that lay hidden of Amy troops and within a few miles of their position, and there volunteers. 2. Soldier Crossing. were no birds in the area to lead them to water. The nearest sure source was the one 3. CheeseboxrWhiteCanyon left behind at the foot of the Bear's Ears, and bench route of pursuit. 4. The that was twenty straight-line miles distant in a pushout. 5. Bear's Ears. land where nothing is straight-line and in a direction that was mostly uphill. AU the men could talk about was water.

As the shadows lengthened in the canyon, Captain Perrine faced his third concern. He knew the Indians enjoyed an intimate knowledge of the land and he did not. If his troops were to be flanked and perhaps driven from the rocks and trees at the foot of the trail, the situation could degenerate into a chaotic rout, especially if the engagement took place at night. To prevent this from happening and with the idea of retrieving their fallen comrades, the soldiers agreed to sight their rifles in on the gap during the day so that at night they could maintain a steady fire that would deny the Utes the opportunity to descend from the pass. Under this covering fire and protected by darkness, four of the cowboys, including Sam Todd, would move up the slope and retrieve the two bodies. Following that, the plan was to retreat.

As the four cowboy volunteers quietly crawled over the trail on the bare, rock-strewn hill, Todd heard a noise. He turned to his companions to find they had disappeared and that seven Indians were coming up behind him along the path, each leading one of the saddled horses left earlier that day. Todd dropped off the side of the trail and lay flat, watching the Indians clearly silhouetted against the night sky. Alone, he slithered toward Higgins's body, only to find the Indians stripping it. Moving to Wormington's location, he found more Utes going through the same

The view southeast downslope across the U.S. position from the Ute position on the mesa. The grassy bench at high center marks the approximate maximum effective range of the military .45-70 rifles. The road visible at lower and upper right was bladed during the mid-1900s.

process. There was also a dog sniffing around that started to growl. Todd knew that he could "do no good" and, if detected, could fire only a few shots before the muzzle flash gave away his position and all was over. He slowly picked his way back down the hill.

When he returned to the perimeter, he learned that his companions had heard the horses coming, feared calling ahead and thus giving away their position, and moved off the trail to lay low. Oblivious to the danger, Todd had made his way up the trail. His companions had returned to safety, assuming that he would also recognize the danger and come back down. All during this time, the force maintained a steady volume of fire on Piute Pass. How the Indians had managed to get through it was a mystery.

To the captain, this was bad news.The Indians had apparently descended by another route to collect the horses, a situation that signaled the very high risk of a flanking attack. If the Utes gained control of the trail to his rear and stood between him and water, all could perish. He ordered everything hastily packed and prepared for movement, so that by ten o'clock the column, frazzled and parched from two days of stress, got underway. Fear was still a factor. Four hours into the retreat, a man named Joe McGrew became deathly sick, most likely from dehydration and exhaustion. As Todd called for assistance, McGrew fell from his horse and had to be carried to the side of the trail.The sergeant of the troop asked what was wrong then told the men to tie the sick cowboy onto his saddle and continue, explaining, "[We] can't delay the whole command or a part of it here in a hostile country:' to which Todd replied, "Sergeant, we have quit and are no longer under command."46An hour's rest put McGrew and his companions back on their horses, and by eight in the morning they had caught up to the retreating column as it climbed back up on Elk Ridge.

By then, the Utes were headed in the opposite direction. According to Albert R. Lyman, who based his history on reports of Bluff cattlemen, at least some of the Indians followed the Old Trail across Red Canyon and thence across North Gulch (now Moki Canyon) via a large sand slide to

4h Todd, "A Pioneer Experience," 4.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

the Pagahrit, a natural lake in Lake Canyon. There they camped for a time, celebrating their victory. Then, leaving behind their wickiups and a scattering of dead and wounded cattle belonging to the Bluff Mormons, they eventually made their way southward across the San Juan River to the isolation of Navajo Mountain."

Three hours after the military rode on top of Elk Ridge, they reached the spring at the base of the Bear's Ears, where they "drank and drank. As soon as the men had drank all they wanted, they began to tumble over and go to sleep."48A lone sentry, who was himself groggy, had the responsibility of keeping watch. Around two o'clock, Todd awakened him by letting him know that Mancos Jim was coming. Suddenly, the half-asleep man sprang to life and had to be reassured that it was a false alarm. The men now discovered that the packs containing all of the provisions had somehow been lost. All that was available were two jars of pickles donated by Captain Perrine. His willingness to share was admirable, but given the fact that no one had eaten in two or three days, his offer did not go very far. As for Todd, he was not "pickle hungry.''

The group next moved to Johnson Creek at the foot of Blue Mountain, where they located five stray cattle belonging to "Racehorse" Johnson. The men killed two steers, slunned them, and cut the meat off in slabs, "every fellow having a stick with a chunk of meat roasting on it.. .. In less than an hour after the animal was dead, it was eaten up."49The party camped there that evening and then moved on toward Colorado.

But problems for Todd had not ended. At Paiute Springs, east of presentday Monticello, he let his crippled horse go with the idea of retrieving it when it had healed. His other mount was played out and could not keep up with the returning column, so Todd dismounted and led it. Eventually, a cowboy, Mike O'Donnel, noticed Todd's absence and decided to turn back to see if there was a problem. He notified Perrine that he was going to search for his friend, to which the captain replied, "I forbid it. We are still in hostile country and if he stopped to monkey with that crippled horse, it is

47 Lyman, The Outlaw of Navaho Mountain, 62. Lyman suggests that the Ute trail led across Mossback Mesa before "skirting the Colorado River" via Red Canyon. This is probably an error on his part, based on the mistaken impression that the scarp at Piute Pass is part of Mossback Mesa, which actually lies miles to the south, beyond Fry Canyon. A much more likely route leads directly southwest from Piute Pass across Red Canyon to the Moki Canyon sandslide via Mancos Mesa.

The Ute trail across the Moki Canyon sandslide was inferred by Lyman's informants from the later discovery there by Bluff stockmen of a pocket watch, believed to have been taken from one of the Piute Pass victims and dropped on the trail by the Utes (see Albert R. Lyman, Indians and Outlaws (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1962), 68. No independent evidence supports that inference.

Lake Pagahrit, or Hermit Lake, was an ancient natural reservoir formed behind a massive falling dune in the drainage now known as Lake Canyon. This was a favorite camp area for both native people and Anglo stockmen prior to the failure of the dam and the emptying of the lake in 1915 following several decades of severe impacts from cattle grazing. See David A. Miller, Hole in the Rock (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1959), 133, and photographs following 112.

4Todd,"A Pioneer Experience," 4.

4y Ibid., 5.

his own look out."

O'Donnel replied, "All right, I am quitting your command 0'Donne1 and Todd eventually worked their way back into Dolores after a series of adventures that strengthened their friendship in years to come. In the meantime, Perrine's cavalry headed south to Mitchell's trading post on the San Juan River to assist in the peacekeeping efforts there. Lieutenant West's B Troop was dispatched back to Fort Lewis, and Perrine's F Troop established a summer encampment on Looking northwest across the the an Juan.51 U.S. position from the southern

At least some of the civilian participants grassy bench, at the approximate blamed Captain Perrine and the army for the maximum range of the army,s Piute Pass debacle. Although some of the following statements would later be retracted,

,4570 rifles. The white line shows the initial report in the Dolores News suggests the approximate route of the trajl, the feelings that many Colorado settlers felt and the ellipse indicates the toward their supposed protectors. The paper probableareawhere Wormington portrayed the soldiers as afraid to fight, stay- andHiggins died. ing "in camp a mile and a half back until after dark" and not rendering any assistance to the cowboys.The Colorado men, on the other hand, "all day long.. .had kept the red devils from the bodies and hoped under cover of darkness to get them." Following the fight, the cowboys left for home [and] were ~oinedby the gentlemen in brass buttons and the little pleasure trip was over. With the soldiers, who did not care to be left alone and unprotected in Indian country, they turned their faces from the field and their heels to the foe and are now rounding up cattle on their respective ranges.The soldiers returned to Fort Lewis, where they will continue to play penny ante while the bones of their scout lie bleaching under the hot rays of the Utah sun and his slayers go unpunished and unp~rsued.~'

A week later the Dolores News had changed its pitch. In one article, the

Ibid.

51 Maj. R. H. Hall, Twenty-second Infantry, Fort Lewis Post Returns, October 1878 to August 1891, Returns from tJ S. Military Postr from 1800 to 191 6, Microfilm Roll 624, National Archives, washington, D.C.

52 Dolores News, July 26, 1884.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

paper noted that part of the force involved in the fight had just returned to Fort Lewis (West's unit) while another part was camped in the Mancos Canyon area (Perrine's F Troop) to prevent further depredations. It went on to say that Mitchell and others living along the San Juan River had been ordered to leave because of the Indians' soured attitude. The Utes had "sworn vengeance on these families."53

A second article was apologetic to the dtary. George West, a well-known cattleman and participant in the fight, provided his views to the paper. He spoke to the issue of "the bravery of an army officer who was blamed by many for seeming cowardicel'West felt the terrain had dictated the outcome of the battle, that Perrine had acted prudently and led by example. Amongst the "[deafening] war whoops and 'lu-yi-ing' of the Indians which they kept up for a long time," the commander had done what he could. When he saw that his scout was shot, he "repeatedly exposed himself in his efforts to induce his men to do some execution and finally called for volunteers to follow him to the point where Wormington was dying. Not a man stepped out and it would have been certain death to every man who went up the hill. Perrine said he would ask no man to go where he himself would not go and that he would lead in person." Certainly, nothing more could have been asked of him as a leader, the article implied.54

The newspaper account closed by noting that two companies from Fort Wingate, two from "the new cantonment on the San Juan," and another one from Fort Lewis were heading after the Utes. Armed with Gatling guns, these five well-equipped companies set out to punish the miscreants. They met with no success if this report is true. West was correct when he said he believed it ineffective to chase the Indians in their own territory. He felt it was better "to kill every Indian on the range or else give up the Some cowboys took this idea to heart when two weeks later they lulled three Indians encountered on the range, or as the paper said, "turned [the Utes'] mud-hooks to the primrose^."^^ A year later, on June 19, 1885, a family of Utes hunting off the reservation would be murdered by unknown assailants as they slept at Beaver Creek, color ad^.^^

In the same article, the editor discussed how reports were surfacing of large numbers of Indians collecting at Navajo Mountain in preparation for a raid. Navajo Agent John H. Bowman had gone to that area to arrest a Navajo man but found he had taken refuge with a band of Utes who defiantly prevented the Navajo's arrest. Most likely, these were some of the same group that had participated in the Soldier Crossing incident. At the same time, Billy Wilson was in the midst of rounding up cattle around Blue

53 Ibid., August 2,1884.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 Dolores News, August 30, 1884.

57 "Southern Ute Agency Report," Report of the Secretary of the Interior, lstSession, 4Yh Congress, H. R., Exec. Doc. 1,241.

Mountain under the protection of a cavalry escort. From Wilson's perspective, the Utes had learned that "their agent is powerless to restrain them; that the government takes but little notice apparently of their movements; that in every fight with the whites they have so far come off victorious and they have therefore resolved to do on the frontier about as they have a mind."58

As for Agent Patten, his concerns were over. In September, the Southern Utes received a new agent,William H. Clark, a former special agent of the Interior Department. He certainly could not have had any false hopes about keeping the Indians on their reservation when he read Secretary of the Interior H. M. Teller's response to the petition sent by the residents of southwestern Colorado. Briefly, Teller said that there was little that he, his agent, or the military could really do to ensure the Utes would remain on their 110-mile-long, fifteen-mile-wide reservation. Teller complained that he had predicted the current problems back in 1880 and had therefore encouraged removal and that now his prophetic advice was being realized. He was not authorized to reimburse for losses, and he recommended that citizens contact their elected congressional representatives. In the interim, the dtary at Fort Lewis would remain in the field and he would appoint a local citizen to work at the agency "to keep the Indians on their reservation," but he also understood the enormity of the task.59Indeed, the Utes would continue to harass the whites for another forty years.

Why was containing this band so difficult?What had gone wrong for the army-and right for the Utes-at Soldier Crossing? A contemporary acronym, METT-T (Mission, Enemy, Terrain, Troops, and Time) summarizes some major principles to consider. From the outset, Perrine had a &fficult mission. Since hostilities had already commenced, his undertaking to retrieve the stolen stock and return the Utes to the reservation was questionable. He might be able to capture the livestock, but to bring in this group of Indians who were not on the best of terms with the other Southern Utes, who had never been on a reservation, and who could see its limitations, was aslung a great deal. Had he clearly understood the complexity of his task, Captain Perrine could never have believed that he would be successful in bringing this band of Utes to the Southern Ute Reservation.

He faced a formidable enemy. The Utes knew the land and its resources intimately. They used its natural medicines to heal their wounded, knew where to locate water and food, traveled familiar trails, denied their enemy access to water, and selected the battlefield of their choice. In a phrase, they were fighting in their own "backyard."

Mobility also played a key role in their logistical plans. Goats provided a portable source of food when hunting became impractical, and the warriors' mobility increased when they captured the large horse herd from

58 Ibid.;John H. Bowman to Warren Patten,August 26,1884, Consol. Ute Agency.

59 Dolores News, October 18,1884.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

which they could draw fresh mounts as necessary. Armed with new Winchester rifles and sufficient ammunition at the outset, they also recovered battlefield weapons, taking their enemy's equipment from the fight in Verdure and likely procuring additional ammunition from the seven horses captured at Soldier Crossing. One also wonders where the missing provisions on the sixteen pack mules ended up.

The Indians used sound tactical doctrine for the running engagement. They left rear security to watch for the approach of the cavalry and to provide long distance warnings (smoke signals) at the enemies' approach. Once they spotted their foe, the Utes task-organized their formation with a rear guard to give the primary fighting force time and flexibility to develop and then exploit the situation. The non-combatants and livestock had the greatest opportunity to escape if necessary. Because of the terrain, the pursuing force could not flank the enemy. High canyon walls, narrow trails, deep valleys and drainages, and the pursuers' general unfamiliarity with the region ensured the Utes' freedom from entrapment.

On the other hand, the Indians' selection of Piute Pass for an engagement was brilliant. Just as the Greek king Leonidas chose the pass at Thermopylae during the Persian War, so too did the Utes select their defensive position well. By using key terrain that provided an observation point, cover, concealment, a selected avenue of approach that could not be flanked, and good fields of fire, the Indians dictated the terms of battle. No matter how many soldiers the enemy could muster, a handful of determined warriors with sufficient ammunition could deny them access to the pass. Indeed, given the logistical problems, large numbers of soldiers were more of a liability than an asset.

In addition to the already-mentioned geographical features, the cowboys and cavalry had other concerns. First was the heat. Men and horses, if not well-watered and rested, become subject to heat stroke and heat exhaustion, as John McGrew and others learned all too well. Todd's account is particularly helpful in noting the effects of heat and the lack of food, rest, and water. While water was uppermost in the men's minds, and rightly so, current studies show that even though appetites may not be robust in hot weather, the intake of food is still essential because of the energy and nutrients burned and sweated out during heavy exertion. The pursuers did not eat for almost three days.

Perrine's suggestion that he could supply such a large force with his sixteen pack mules seems slightly presumptuous, if not naive. He certainly underestimated the difficulty of his task and the strategic advantage held by the Utes, and he may have assumed that he could achieve his objectives in a very short time. Haste seems to have been a primary concern. Perhaps, like General George Crook in the Apache wars being waged at the same time, Perrine hoped to gain mobility by not being tied to wagons and field howitzers too cumbersome for efficient trail pursuit. That should not have precluded the cowboys from provisioning themselves with their own

supplies and pack stock, however, or the army from pre-positioning supplies at accessible points along the way, at least at Verdure or Paiute Springs. At the same time, each of the men should have kept individual rations in his saddlebag-hard tack, salt bacon, dried beans, jerky, or other easily transportable foods. Standard rations for field soldiers at this time were three quarters of a pound of meat and one pound of hard tack per day for five days.60If Perrine had supplied even this, his men could have sustained themselves better in the field.

The necessity of water is so apparent in Todd's account that it hardly needs repeating. Without sufficient water containers and not knowing the location of nearby springs, Perrine charged into a situation of grave danger. There were at least three springs within a three-mile radius of Soldier Crossing, but the notion of watching birds to locate water is for the birds, not for men in c0mbat.A well-protected scouting party or two would have increased the chances of finding water. He did send out men to look for water, but accounts give the impression that these were short sallies and obviously ineffective.

The necessity to move during the day in order to track the Indians added to the problem of thirst, while the apparent breakneck speed Perrine maintained in the belief that he was about to overtake the enemy created a killer pace.Varying terrain and circumstances dictate how far and fast a cavalry unit can travel, but a general figure of twenty des per day was used by the military at the time." Perrine's command far surpassed the suggested rate of travel. His men rode from Durango to Cross Canyon'Verdure, Elk Ridge, the Bear's Ears, the Pushout, and then Soldier Crossing, a distance of about two hundred miles, in less than a week. He averaged more than thirty miles a day. Little wonder the horses were exhausted.

The troops that served under Perrine were a mixed lot. Personal accounts as well as those in the newspaper give a clear impression that there was no love lost between the military and civilian factions. The soldiers' not sharing water, the sergeant's and captain's insensibility to the care of some of the men, and the quick response of "I'm no longer under your command" show all too well the brittle relations formed between the two. This is further illustrated by how quickly the Dolores News attacked the military with its "penny ante" statement and portrayed them as cowardly. A coalition of this sort, raised in the heated aftermath of the Verdure fight, offered little time to work out rules of order. The cowboys elected Rube Lockett as their leader, but little is said of his personality and his role in interacting with the military. All accounts, civilian and military, leave no doubt that the captain was in charge.Yet many of these cowboys had also been involved in the Pinhook fight, and at one point those men had

''

60DonRickey, Jr., Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963):220-21.

Ibid., 244.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

actually drawn their guns against the military.62No doubt Perrine had to walk a fine line.

Both soldiers and civilians appeared to share one common characteristic: When they got tired, discipline relaxed. Men falling out of the saddle and going to sleep, the siesta around the springs at the Bear's Ears,Wormington and Higgins scouting ahead against the advice of others, and posted guards falling asleep speak not only of exhaustion but also of a poor system for maintaining sufficient security. One wonders what would have happened if the false alarm of "Here comes Mancos Jim" had been true. If the Utes had pursued the retreating force and caught them at the watering hole, there could have been an even greater tragedy.

Time, the last principle, was also an important factor on the Indians' side. The whites' haste in forming the posse, developing plans, and moving the expedition contrasts sharply with the Utes' travel of ten miles per day, which allowed for recreation and recuperation. By the time the pursuers reached the pursued, they were physically exhausted while their enemy was more rested. The lack of food and water also gave urgency to a quick decisive action rather than a slower, prolonged campaign. The Indians' knowledge of water and resources in their country gave them the ability, if they chose, to sit on top of Piute Pass indefinitely. Behind the long escarpment in which they hid lay a desert with springs, seeps, and intermittent streams to provide their needs. Thus, from a military standpoint, there is little question why the Indians triumphed over the cavalry.

As 1884 drew to a close, a great deal of dissatisfaction rankled the people in the Four Corners region. The ranchers were still losing stock to the Utes. Edmund Carlisle, working with Agent Clark, sought redress. Three months of claims investigation did not provide much comfort, so Carlisle wrote a letter on December 30 complaining that he had lost more than 150 horses to theft and had recovered only thirteen. As for the estimated 750 cattle he had lost, he entertained no more hope of getting them back than he did the "company outfits which the employees were driven to abandon on account of the presence of these Indian~."~~Time would show that the Carlisles received little recompense for their losses.

The government would not gain much satisfaction either. The huge geographical area was too vast to allow for a concentrated effort against a vaporous target. The Ute and Navajo reservations provided refuge for the Indians in time of need, while the isolation of the Blue, La Sal, and Navajo Mountain regions, with all of the intervening canyon country, provided a series of escape options. Jurisdictional concerns between Indian agents, a high rate of agent turnover, and disagreements with civilian factions added to the conflict. Lack of funding for reservation improvements and a shortage of supplies for the Indians encouraged the "renegade band" in

62 Salmon and McPherson, "Cowboys, Indians, and Conflict," 25.

63 Edmund S. Carlisle tom M. Clark, December 30,1884, Consol. Ute Agency.

southeastern Utah to remain free from government control. Even the more pacific Utes who lived on the reservation had to hunt off the reservation in order to survive. Col. L. l? Bradley, commander of the 13th Infantry, noted in 1885 that the Utes were issued only one pound of beef and three and one-half pounds of flour per person per week; even when supplemented, this was less than two-thirds of one full ration. He "urged that the proper steps be taken to secure a full supply of food for the Utes as the surest means of preventing hostilities between them and the whites."64 It was a long time before others heeded his advice.

Even the victorious Utes were not terribly happy. True, they had sent a second, strong message that the white invaders should steer clear of Ute lands. But they could not have missed the ever-increasing numbers of settlers, ranchers, and livestock coming into their territory. The probability that they would eventually lose their lands became more and more evident. Towns, with all of their attendant economic development, sprang up where only sagebrush, piiion, and juniper had been: Monticello (1887), Aneth (1895), and Blanding (1905).

More anger, frustration, and death lay ahead in the years to come. Not until 1923 with the concluding "Posey War" did the question of control receive its final answer. After that, all the Utes could do was recall past victory, applying the memory of the fights at Pinhook and Soldier crossing as a soothing balm.

In 1984 one hundred Utes-men, women, and children-visited the site to commemorate their heritage. Myers Cantsee, son of Scottie Cantsee, a participant in the battle, recounted his father's views. Following the program, Ute community members of White Mesa participated in chanting their traditional songs, old men danced the victory dance, and people hiked the trail at Piute Pass.65

Nearby lay the bones ofworrnington and Higgins. Bleached by the sun for almost two years, their remains had been gathered by two prospectors, Cass Hite and Joe Duckett, and moved almost three miles from where they had fallen to their final resting place near the White Canyon ford at Soldier Crossing. Later, a cowboy built a pole fence around the grave; in 1930 a group of Boy Scouts constructed a wood and wire fence, and in 1954 a painted fence was erected with a small sign commemorating the events? Now, only an occasional tourist traveling down the paved highway heading for Lake Powell stops to stretch and wonder about these two lonely men left by their comrades on the battlefield. Their burial site testifies to the difficulty of conducting military operations against an indigenous foe in canyon country.

64 "Report of Colonel Bradley," Report of the Secretary of War, 1" Session, 4Yh Congress, vol. 1,1885,161. " SanJuan Record, October 31,1984.

" Clarence Rogers, addendum to SamToddYs"A Pioneer Experience," July 29,1965, USHS.

Navajo Lijeways: Contemporary Issues, Ancient Knowledge

By Maureen Trudelle Schwarz

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. xix + 265 pp. $29.95.)

Navajo Lijeways: Contemporary Issues, Ancient Knowledge is a collection of six essays and a philosophical introduction bound together by the complementarity of contemporary issues and ancient Dink knowledge. The author, Maureen Trudelle Schwarz, provides a close look at six events or ongoing situations of major interest that occurred within the Navajo Nation in the 1990s. She illuminates each event and situation with a traditional Navajo perspective based on ancient and timeless tenets of Dine philosophy. She juxtaposes current western perspectives with current Navajo perspectives and provides origin points through oral histories for the Navajo perspectives.

A common practice of non-Indians writing about Indian philosophical issues is to place more credence on writers who have passed the fifw-year test-that is, who have been in print for more than fifty years. Present-day native philosophers often express frustration that their own words are not taken seriously in the academic world. Schwarz has spent time on the Navajo Nation and has interviewed contemporary Navajo historians, anthropologists, storytellers and ceremonial practitioners. She allows the thinking and explanations of present-day Navajo consultants, teachers, and spiritual leaders to provide focus and articulation to each selected issue. Using the Navajo perspective, she has written a book that will be of interest to Navajo and non-Navajo alike. Navajo readers will enjoy the way in whlch everyday thinlang is tied to the ceremonial and spiritual practices. Non-Navajo readers will gain insight into the Navajo perspective of relating contemporary life issues to ancient and ongoing ceremonial practices.

Schwarz's dual approach of contemporary issues and ancient yet ongoing perspective has seldom been employed to illuminate present-day Navajo living. The title of her book, Navajo Lijeways, expresses a current way of living, but the use of the word lifeways ties her explanations to Navajo ceremonials, which are often translated as "ways7'-as in Blessingway, Enemyway, Protectionway, and Shootingway-since they are not static but are rather active processes that interrelate current problems or situations with the happenings of ancient oral history.

The book is introduced by the words of Navajo storyteller Sunny Dooley, who translates the words of ancient origin stories in her poetic rendering of the creation. She speaks of the

Emergence of Navajo People into the world of today, closing with:

Like in the beginning

What was ordered and careful Became chaos and scattered And

Comes back into place only when The spoken words are spun into existence

This song/poem becomes the touchstone of Schwarz's discussion of current Navajo issues. In an enlightening introduction, she retells highlights of the Navajo origin stories, building a platform from which to explain the importance of oral traditions "in shaping Navajo understandings of problems and situations." She simplifies a very complex process of cosmic interrelationships for the nonNavajo reader, at the same time using sophisticated academic words to clarify her interpretation of her consultants' remarks. Her explanation of a Navajo core worldview as "a parakgm for ritual action and use of space, structured on homology, complementarity and synecdoche,'' may send the casual reader to the dictionary, but her use of words is clarifying and illuminating for the academic reader. Her attempt to explain the Navajo perspective of history as an ongoing process of "what is constantly in the making" would be understood by Navajos in juxtaposition to the Euro-American emphasis on "objectified representation of knowledge about reality.''

The six main chapters encompass six issues of major interest that occurred in the 1990s, with a discussion of a primary element of Navajo philosophy in each chapter. Beginning with an analysis of the Hantavirus episodes of 1993 and a discussion of the forced Navajo relocation issues, continuing with the visitation of the Holy People to a remote area of the reservation in 1996 and occurrences of snakes in the women's restroom in Window Rock, Schwarz analyzes each issue in terms of Navajo conceptions of holistic healing, personhood, gender, and relationship with the land. Concluding with chapters on activism expressed through emotional expression and problem drinking, she addresses concepts of reciprocal relationship and harmony.

Schwarz concludes her book with a discussion of how the analysis and implementation of differing levels of interpretation of Navajo traditional stories with their encoded insights contribute to the creative adaptation of traditional knowledge to the challenges faced today.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Navajo perspective of life as it appears in the late twentieth

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

century and continues on into the twenty-first century. I might caution readers, however, that traditional Din6 philosophy based on oral history is extremely complex, and although Schwarz makes a highly credible attempt to explain it in a single book, encoding it as a charter for living, it is a cosmic process of interrelationshlps not easily understood in a lifetime. Schwarz uses her consultants as highly respected holders of knowledge but still frames her book through a Euro-American perspective. Her reliance on the concept of "metaphor" might well be contested by many traditional knowledge holders, who would prefer to characterize their belief system as reality.

A Homeland in the West: UtahJews Remember

By Eileen Hallet Stone

(Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001. xvi + 500 pp. $39.95.)

DESPITE THE IRONY of being considered "gentiles" in predominantly Mormon Utah, Jews made significant contributions to the political, economic, and social development of the state. Most were immigrants, first from Central Europe and later from Eastern Europe, who had joined in the great migration, attracted by the promise of Golden America. Propelled largely by anti-Semitism, poverty, and religious and economic restrictions in Germany, Russia, and Poland, they came in search of a different life that would offer them and their children new opportunities. In A Homeland in the West: Utah Jews Remember, writer Eileen Hallet Stone skillfully weaves together more than sixty-five memoirs and oral histories to tell the remarkable story of these resourceful men and women. Despite great odds, they managed to carve out a productive life in an alien culture while holding on to their Jewish heritage through the founding of synagogues and religious schools and the observance, at least on some level, of Jewish rituals.

Most of the early Jews in Utah followed the familiar path of German and Eastern European Jewish immigrants in America, often beginning as peddlers, moving on to become shopkeepers after amassing the necessary capital, and in a few cases achieving significant success as merchant princes. Julius and Fannie Brooks, Utah's first documented Jewish couple, operated a string of businesses. Stone presents a lively memoir written by the daughter of Julius and Fannie that graphically illustrates the perseverance and

NANCY C. MARYBOY Shonto Preparatory School Shonto, Arizona

creativity of these early pioneers. A few, like Simon Bamberger, achieved financial success through venues such as mining and railroad interests. In 1917, Bamberger was elected Utah's only Jewish governor, but several other Jews also achieved political prominence, including Louis Marcus, mayor of Salt Lake City. Excerpts from Bamberger's memoirs and inaugural speech demonstrate the vision and talent of ths German immigrant who made Utah his home.

Many of the early pioneers developed at least a working elationship with Mormon leaders, including Brigham Young. For the most part, Jews and Mormons lived in relative harmony, but relations were sometimes strained, as they were during a Mormon boycott of "gentile" businesses. This was the case vis-i-vis the Auerbach brothers, who had opened their first store in Salt Lake City in 1864 and by 1883 saw the worth of their business grow to half a million dollars. Stone's book not only covers the lives of early pioneers but also moves forward chronologically and ends with an interview with a contemporary Jewish resident, the wife of the local Lubavitch rabbi. The book also includes a section of traditional Jewish foods and aYiddish glossary.

Due in part to the ethnic "revolution" of the 1960s and the resultant American preoccupation with exploring family and community roots, local Jewish history has gained a new prominence over the last several decades. Stone's volume reveals both the promise and pitfalls inherent in this increasingly popular form of writing American Jewish history. The author provides the reader with a well-chosen, wide array of memoir, diary, and oral history segments, many of them treasures that have probably been tucked away in archives for years. Many of the selections are truly revealing, illuminating the special challenges that faced Jews settling in a unique western community. The handsome photographs that are scattered through the book enhance their stories and help make them come alive.

At the same time, the book ofien suffers from a failure to put the experiences of these individuals into a broader historical perspective. Many of the memoirs or interviews stand on their own, without any sort of introduction. The author frequently breaks the excerpts, as well as her own brief overview of the history of the Jews of Utah, into small sections with headings. These numerous divisions and headings are often distracting. The most serious deficiency of the book, however, is that A Homeland in Utah suffers from what historian Kathleen Neils Conzen has termed an "insular" approach to the study of local communities, one that fails, for the most part, to draw broader comparisons with

other communities and shed light on the wider North American Jewish experience. How does the development of the Utah Jewish community compare and contrast with that of Los Angeles, Denver,Tucson, or Santa Fe-or with Jewish communities on the East Coast, for that matter? However, the author admits from the beginning that her book is not a history of Utah Jews but rather is about "historical conversations." Despite its drawbacks, A Homeland in Utah contributes another strand to the complex tapestry that we know as the North American Jewish experience.

JEANNE ABRAMS University of Denver

General Crook and the Western Frontier

By Charles M. Robinson 111

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. xix + 386 pp. 39.95.)

FOR MANY STUDENTS of the U.S. military, George Crook is somewhat of an enigma. Crook supporters have touted him as one of the finest soldiers who ever served in the army of the United States. Detractors thought him to be egotistical, ambitious, and vindictive. Moreover, his reputation as an Indian fighter contrasted sharply with the response of the remnant of the Apaches who, when receiving notice of his death in March 1890, "sat down in a great circle, let down their hair, bent their heads forward on their bosoms, and wept and wailed like ~hildren.~'Anenigma indeed.

Charles Robinson's new biography of Crook creates a portrait that is balanced and believable. Beginning with Crook's Civil War efforts, the author points out that, despite his West Point education, he was far from being a military genius when compared to the likes of Ulysses Grant,William Sherman, and Philip Sheridan. His generalship during the war proved innovative at times, predictable at others, and full of blunders. Robinson correctly adds, however, that few Union generals were military geniuses, and many made far worse blunders than Crook did.

Robinson is best when analyzing Crook7s postwar military career as an Indian fighter. In the Pacific Northwest and Northern Plains, Crook wasted animals and men "far out of proportion to any gains" (193, 311). At times, he seemed to understand the Indians, but rarely did he use that knowledge in his military campaigns against them. As Robinson aptly demonstrates, it would be in Arizona that his reputation was made. For instance, in "The Grand Offensive of 1872-73" against warring Apaches, Crook

deftly approached them as friends, as enemies, and as wards of the government. As a result, the Apaches surrendered, returned to the reservation, and were aided by Crook in developing new farming techniques.

Yet Robinson portrays another side to Crook. His pretentiousness, shameless cultivation of the press, and efforts to surround himself with officers who were loyal and obedient manifested his preference for image over merit. Apparently, Crook spent as much time making sure that he received the proper accolades for his military efforts as he spent actually fighting Indians. Ultimately this paid off when he was jumped two grades from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general-something unheard-of in the postwar army. Needless to say, he made enemies of many senior soldiers who were passed over for promotion because of him. Although the general had hoped to create an image of himself as another Zachary Taylor, a military man who rarely wore a uniform and disdained military customs, Crook actually resembled the twentieth-century general Douglas MacArthur in his concern over image and his penchant for political intrigue (xvii).

Despite his faults, Robinson asserts, Crook's major asset was his humanity. He believed that the Indian was entitled to the dignity and justice offered to any U.S. citizen and pursued this end with his military position and political connections. As a Progressive reformer, Crook sought to make Indians into useful citizens through education, assimilation, and adoption of white standards. This was in contrast to generals like Nelson Miles who believed that the Indians should either be exterminated or reduced to permanent dependence on the government. As a humanitarian, Robinson concludes, Crook achieved greatness.

The book is well written, uses new sources, and dispels many myths about the enigmatic life of an important figure in the history of the nineteenth-century American West and the U.S. military. It is a must-read.

MARK R. GRANDSTAFF Brigham Young University

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Being Dgerent: Stories of Utah's Minorities

Edited by Stanford J. Layton

(Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 200 1.xxi + 243 pp. Paper, $21.95

.)

THIS INTRIGUING AND VALUABLE volume of essays should stand on the shelf of anyone interested in western history, cross-cultural communication, or the dynamics of immigration versus community. Students and scholars seeking a fresh approach to Utah history will find its contents replete with surprising details. Fourteen essays collected from issues of Utah Historical Quarterly over several decades, and introduced by Stanford J. Layton, offer insights into a variety of groups, with a depth and acuity that general histories rarely achieve.

Three essays discuss an all-out resistance to immigration-with the Shoshones, Northern Utes, and Skull Valley Gosiutes resisting the encroachment of Yankees, Southerners, and Europeans. Not surprisingly, our current debates and conflicts flicker interestingly in these historical mirrors. This comment in Layton's introduction offers one example: "Lost amid today's debates regarding nuclear waste repositories in Skull Valley is the simple historical fact that the SkullValley Gosiutes have held and continue to hold an abiding love of their homeland.. .."

Indeed, the reader learns that a Polynesian colony also called arid Skull Valley home. Tracey E. Panek writes: "The Deseret News described Hawaiian Pioneer Day [in Iosepa] in 1908: 'The crowd was a most cosmopolitan one, comprising 100 Hawaiians, 27 American Indians, 13 Samoans, 6 Maoris, 1 Portuguese, 5 half caste Portuguese, 3 families of Scotchmen, several families of English."' More populated areas also claimed diverse communities.

In the first essay, Richard 0. Ulibarri sets the parameters of the discussion, writing: "The true ethnic minorities are those who, because of racial or cultural difference, have been treated as a group apart, who are held in lower esteem, and who are deferred from opportunities open to the dominant group." He adds an important distinction for readers in a nation populated mainly by immigrants and their descendants: "Of critical importance is the fact that Indians, blacks, and Chicanos are conquered people, thus having suffered deculturalization and cultural isolation.. .. None of these groups shared in the American frontier experience except on the wrong end of the action."The exception, perhaps, would be freed blacks who entered the West as explorers or soldiers.

Within these essays the state of Utah shimmers with vibrant contrasts, from the Greeks in Bingham Canyon to the Italians in

Price, from the black infantry stationed at Fort Douglas to the Scandinavians gathered near Manti, and from a Jewish colony in Sanpete County to a Japanese colony outside Heber City. Mexican-American culture-ever-present in the West and little noted-is also explored here. Throughout, the Mormon overlay and its effects on virtually all Utahns add complexity, and sometimes harmony, to the cross-cultural experience.

When the essays are read together, even the authors' and their sources' discrepancies in ethnic terminology provide a subtle but effective commentary on how perspective changes over time and with events. Layton's selection of authors is astute. In addition to those mentioned, he mingles Michael J. Clark, Steven J. Crum, Everett L. Cooley, John W. Heaton, Edward H. Meyer, Claire Noall, Philip F. Notarianni, Helen Papanikolas, Irene Stoof Pear main, Sandra C. Taylor, Albert Winkler, and Wilham A. Wilson. Each attunes the reader's view to a different and specific reality, enriching and enlivening our understanding of community, both past and present.

LINDA SlLLlTOE Weber State University Ogden, Utah

Down

by the Lemonade Springs: Essays on Wallace Stegner By Jackson J.

(Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001. xvii + 174 pp. Paper, $24.95.)

Benson

STUDENTS OF THE AMERICAN WEST should want to acquaint themselves with Wallace Stegner (1909-93), and Benson's essays in his Lemonade Springs look like a good choice for striking up (or for furthering) that acquaintance. Stegner was often affectionately referred to as "the dean of western literature," which referred to his important contributions to history and to biography, along with his prize-winning achievements with fiction-a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. In fact, it is still often remarked, now seven years after his death, how no one looks quite capable of filling his shoes. He appears to have been one of those rare, overarching talents who may come along only once every three or four generations.

First, a word about the tantalizing "lemonade springs" of Benson's title; these are lyrics effectively evocative of Stegner's liberalism-with its populist twist. The "lemonade springs" have come to Benson's title by way of the popular song by Harry

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McClintock, "In the Big Rock Candy Mountain." Now, one who knows a little bit about Stegner will recognize The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1938) as the title Stegner gave to his first major novel, in which he began to express his suspicions about western stereotypes and myths. And those knowledgeable about Stegner will also recognize that Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992) is a crystallization of his mature essays on the stubborn destructiveness of western stereotypes and myths. Rather than the rugged individualism so vital to the mythic West, Stegner favored realism and, when necessary, an out-and-out aggressive iconoclasm.Thus armed, he became a champion, first, of massive public relief during the depression, and second, of the rise of laborwhich, incidentally, was the issue he explored in his biographical novel Joe Hill (1950)' about that dark, ambiguous figure who went down a martyr in his fight with laissez-faire industry. Of course, Harry McClintock7sgreat song runs down this same populist vein, with its bouncy lyrics about "box cars [that] all are empty," and therefore the hoboes7refuge, along with "the handouts [that] grow on bushes" and "cigarette trees" and "lemonade springm-all "Where the blue bird sings / In the Big Rock Candy Mountain." This, then, is the considerable freight of political allusion that Benson's Down by the Lemonade Springs must carry.

Historians will find the first half of Benson's essay collection more relevant, while literary critics (and literary historians) should better appreciate Benson's concluding pieces, which are more tightly focused and self-contained interpretations of Stegner's fiction. Benson's leading pieces appear under such titles as "The Battle against Rugged Individualism"; "Artist a Environmentalist"; and "Evaluating the Environmentalist." This gathering suggests something important in our recent history of ideas. That is, the strongest surge of the old populism seems to have run underground for a few decades and emerged as our environmentalism. In large part, we have Stegner to thank for this. As Benson demonstrates, Stegner's essay compilation under the title The Sound of Mountain Water (1946) has become a classic in this growing genre-the first piece of many reflecting Stegner's sustained interest.

Finally, Jackson Benson is unquestionably one to listen to. It was his good fortune to have gotten not only Stegner's authorization for a biography but Stegner's cooperation as well. Having interviewed Stegner extensively, Benson did up his subject in 472 pages, Wallace Stegner: His Li$e and Work (1996), worthy of the Evans Prize in Biography. Now, five years later, Benson follows

with these well-seasoned Lemonade reflections. They are going on my shelf, right next to Benson7s big biography. Down by the Lemonade Springs ought to be shelved within easy reach in all our public libraries, and in quite a few private ones, too. It is a good addition.

RUSSELL BURROWS Weber State University

Seeing and Being Seen: ~urismin the American West Edited by David M. Wrobel and Patrick T. Long (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001. xv + 336 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $19.95.)

THIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS on tourism in the American West is organized into three groups: Part One, "Perspectives: Scholars and Tourists," addresses some of the complex issues surrounding perceptions of tourists and those impacted by tourism; Part Two, "Processes: Tourism and Cultural Change," examines tourism in a historical context and addresses its cultural impact on communities and tourists; Part Three, "Parks: Tourists in Western Wonderlands," explores the history and impact of tourism in the western national parks from the late nineteenth century to the present.

In his excellent introduction, David Wrobel defines the tourist as someone who travels in order to experience unfamiliar surroundings. He discusses the creation of "heritage" and introduces the concept of pseudo-tourism, where towns like Red Lodge, Montana, have in response to tourism played with the past by dressing miners up like cowboys, Inlans, and Italian immigrants. However, Wrobel notes, the impact of tourism on culture is difficult to access because culture is not static but is in flux and changes regardless of tourism.

The essays in the first part identie the confhct that can exist between those seelung preservation and those who just want pleasure from travel. Distinctions are made between travelers-those seeking enlightenment-and tourists-those pursuing only entertainment.The essays ask whether business people, who see tourism as an industry, can work with professionals in the humanities and social sciences who care little about the balance sheet and are more interested in people and places. Other issues examined include questions of authenticity vs. recreation and whether there is really a "mystique of the West" and if so, how it might be

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preserved.

Patricia Nelson Limerick's comic narrative about how she was a cowgirl as a child-and then as an adult became an analyzer of tourism-comes to the conclusion that both the tourist and the provider of the tourism experience have sinned against the other. Most important, Limerick warns, "Historians had better put some effort into the sympathetic understanding of the interior world of tourists, because tourists are, in some not necessarily very agreeable way, our kinfolk." She makes an impassioned plea: "It does not seem entirely justifiable for historians to turn on their heels and retreat from the impurities of heritage tourism.''

Other essays address similar issues. Rudolfo Anaya examines how residents and tourists learn about a region. Patrick T. Long analyzes the costs and economic benefits of heritage tourism. He warns that in order for tourism to be successful as a long-term economic development strategy in rural western communities, it needs the support and input of a significant majority of cornrnunity residents. Long sees that most communities, in addition to attracting more tourist dollars, also seek to beautify their surroundings, improve the quality of life, and preserve what is locally authentic. Hal Rothman concludes the essays in Part One with his observations that residents of those communities that embraced tourism expected "their lives to remain the same. They did not anticipate nor were they prepared for the ways in which tourism would change them, the rising cost of property in their town, the traffic, the self-perception that the work they did was not important, the diminishing sense of pride in work and ultimately in community, and the tears in the social fabric that followed." He further warns, "This is the core of the complicated devil's bargain that is twentieth-century tourism in the American West. Success creates the seeds of its own destruction as more and more people seek the experience of an authentic place transformed to seem more authentic."

Part Two includes four essays that highlight how tourism promoters have created highly specific and selective images of western people and places. The essays also stress that tourism has real cultural, economic, and political effects on both the visited and the visitor.The essays emphasize that these processes of historical and cultural change are complex and do not lend themselves to easy generalizations. They do, however, lay out the common theme that travelers have sought to escape the forces and influences of the East and find democracy and true freedom in the West .

The essays in Part Three continue the stimulating dlalogue as they examine the conflicts of the traveler vs. the tourist, the elite vs. the unwashed, enjoyment vs. enlightenment, authentic vs. pseudo, and heritage tourism as preserver vs. heritage tourism as changer. Thrown into the mix are issues relating to infrastructure, new construction, freedom from femininity, romanticism, and the mystification of the West.

Above all, the essays challenge historians and others whose expertise and training allow them to make worthwhile contributions to leave the security of the sidelines and get their uniforms a little muddied and perhaps their egos a little bruised as they actively participate on the field of heritage tourism.

WILSON MARTIN Utah State Historical Society

Coal Camp Days: A Boy's Remembrance

By Ricardo L. Garcia (Albuquerque:

University of New Mexico Press, 2001.295 pp. Paper, $24.95.)

The author has fictionalized his life as a child in a northern New Mexican coal camp during World War 11. Living among the usual diverse nationalities of a coal camp, the Hispanic family in the book experiences birth, death, and the ever-present danger of mining accidents.When his children express an interest in becoming coal miners, the father takes them into the mine and explains that the earth is like a giant layer cake.The coal is the frosting, and the miners are tiny insects trying to take the frosting out without having the cake collapse on them. But not until he himself falls victim to a cave-in do the children give up their romanticized notions of mining.

The book describes war celebrations and war fears, a fishing trip,Victory gardening, pranks, faith, and such details as sharing a bed with two brothers and having to take turns sleeping in the undesirable center position.

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The Arduous Road: Salt Lake to Los Angeles, the Most Dficult Wagon Road in American History

By

Leo Lyman and

Larry

Reese (Victorville,CA: Lyman Historical

Research and Publishing, 2001.108 pp. Paper, $20.)

Former Mormon Battalion members returning to California took the first wagon over what became and remains a significant route of travel. Some seven thousand freighters, forty-niners, emigrants, and Mormon colonizers followed them. Some of these actually had northern Cahfornia as their goal but decided to trade the rigors of travel across the Salt Flats and the Sierra for a 300-mile desert road that offered only ten watering stops. This book begins by recounting some of the journeys on the trail during the 1840s and 1850s. The second section describes places and experiences along the trail in detail, quoting extensively from the journals of the travelers. Contemporary photographs and maps enhance the text and the historical photos.

The Saints and the Union: Utah Territory during the Civil War BY E. B. Long (198 1;reprint ed., Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001. xiii + 3 10 pp. Paper, $18.95.)

Brigham Young, "narrow, shrewd, and careful. .in his actions, if not always in his words, during the war years" (268), and Patrick Connor, "headstrong (though not to the point of recklessness).. .opinionated in the extreme, and always controversial" (270), take center stage in this volume that describes what was happening in Utah during the bloodletting in the East.

The author asserts that both men possessed character and principles and that both, "despite obvious faults, served their faiths and their nation well." He lets each speak for himself, with the strident rhetoric on one side counterpointing that on the other.This is a well-balanced, well-reasoned, and enlightening volume.

The Northern Navajo Frontiev, 1860- 1900 By Robert S. McPherson (1988; reprint, Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001. 144 pp. Paper, $19.95.)

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a complex web of associations characterized human interaction in the Four Corners area. Utes, Paiutes, Navajos, cowboys, traders, miners, and Mormon settlers all mingled in the Four Corners area, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in alliance. Generally, the northern Navajos who had remained free during the Bosque Redondo incarceration used these relationships to good advantage. Although they had historically fought with the Utes, they formed alliances and kinship bonds with the Paiutes

and, through them, with the Utes.

With the Mormons, the Navajos also maintained friendship and even "converted" to the religion as long as this stance served their interest, but when Mormons encroached on their territory the Navajos responded by sending their herds onto Mormon lands, protesting against Mormon appropriation of water and land, mutilating calves, and expanding the range of their herds. They eventually won the expulsion of Mormons from the reservation.With settlers in general, Navajos also refrained from open hostility but instead expanded their sheep grazing and, at times, threatened violence.

Author McPherson details these trends and calls the Navajo actions an aggressive defensive policy.The Navajos, he writes, were astute players in the events that saw their reservation boundaries expanded during the same period that other tribes lost territory.

Religion in the Modern American West By Ferenc Morton Szasz (2000;reprint,Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002.249 pp. Paper, $19.95.)

First published in hardback, and reviewed in UHQ 69 (Fall 2001), this comprehensive study of the relationship of religions and the West has been released in paper.

The Multicultural Southwest: A Reader Edited by A. Gabriel Melkndez, M.Jane Young, Patricia Moore, and Patrick Pynes (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002.300 pp. Cloth, $45.00;paper, $24.95.)

The essays, stories, poems, and other writings in this volume are as diverse as the topic. Readers will find new understandings of both traditional and contemporary lives, for instance, in Rina Swentzell's explanation of a mid-century Tewa community's connection to its dwellings and space. The people interacted with their homes as if the adobe buildings were living beings. They also let the houses die of old age-when one house developed a large crack, the author's greatgrandmother said, "It has been a good house, it has been taken care of, fed, blessed and healed many times during its life, and now it is time for it to go back into the earth" (88). Soon afterward, the structure collapsed.

UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Angels $Darkness: A Drama in Three Ads

By Arthur Conan Doyle.

Edited and with an introduction by Peter Blau (NewYork: Baker Street Irregulars in cooperation with the Toronto Public Library, 2001. x + 191 pp. ???.)

A facsimile of an unfinished play by the creator of Sherlock Holmes and five scholarly essays comprise this volume. The play closely resembles Conan Doyle's novel A Study in Scarlet, and an essay by Utahn Michael Homer explores the Mormon subplot-centered around fiendish Danite deeds-in both. Homer describes the literary, Masonic, and Spiritualist sources that influenced these works. He also details the author's first visit to Utah some forty years after writing the novel and play (and the crowd that, despite his negative writings about Mormonism, filled the Tabernacle to hear him speak), his belief in Spiritualism, and his growing appreciation of Mormonism's similarity to Spiritualism and of Joseph Smith's abilities as a medium.

When Montana and I Were Young: A Frontier Childhood

By

Margaret

Bell.

Edited and with an introduction by Mary Clearman Blew (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. di + 253 pp. $24.95.)

A box of papers found in a garage turned out to be a remarkable memoir of an unusual childhood. In the care of a sadistic and shiftless stepfather, young Peggy did a man's work, acquired great skill at ranching and horsemanship, and endured horrific abuse.Yet instead of playing the victim, she "learned to take the blows without collapsing" (242) and grew tough, eventually breaking free and creating the life she wanted. As an adult in the 1940s she tried to get her vivid narrative published, but that had to wait until the manuscript's rediscovery. Its appearance now is a victory for those who struggle to let the female voice, too often silenced, be heard.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Department of Community and Economic Development Division of State History

BOARD OF STATE HISTORY

RICHARD W. SADLER, Ogden, 2003, Chair

PAM MILLER, Price, 2003, vice Chair

GARY N.ANDERSON, Logan, 2005

PAUL ANDERSON, Salt Lake City, 2003

KENDALL W: BROWN, Provo, 2005

MICHAEL W. HOMER, Salt Lake City, 2005

KIM A. HYATT, Bountiful, 2005

JOEL C. JANETSKI, Provo, 2005

ROSS PETERSON, Logan, 2003

PAUL D. WILLIAMS, Salt Lake City, 2003

WALLY WRIGHT, Salt Lake City, 2005

ADMINISTRATION

WILSON G. MARTIN, Acting Director

PHILIP E NOTARIANNI ,Associate Director

STANFORD J. LAYTON, Managing Editor

KEVIN T.JONES, State Archaeologist

The Utah State Historical Society was organized in 1897 by public-spirited Utahns to collect, preserve, and publish Utah and related history. Today, under state sponsorship, the Society fulfills its obligations by publishing the Utah Historical Quarterly and other historical materials; collecting historic Utah artifacts; locating, documenting, and preserving historic and prehistoric buildings and sites; and maintaining a specialized research library. Donations and gifts to the Society's programs, museum, or its library are encouraged, for only through such means can it live up to its responsibility of preserving the record of Utah's past.

This publication has been funded with the assistance of a matching grant-in-aid from the National Park Service, under provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 as amended.

This program receives financial assistance for identification and preservation of historic properties under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The U. S. Department of the Interior prohibits unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, or handicap in its federally assisted programs. If you believe you have been discriminated against in any program, activity, or facility as described above, or if you desire further information, please write to: Office of Equal Opportunity, National Park Service, 1849 C Street, NW, Washington, D.C., 20240.